Why the ACA is Important to Women's Health

The Affordable Care Act and Women’s Health

Many would say that the Affordable Care Act was a massive failure, and that it had no lasting or helpful effect on any type of healthcare. That is not correct. The Affordable Care Act specifically impacted many aspects of American health care, including health care for the poor, for the elderly, and most importantly, for the aspect of this paper, women. The Affordable Care Act has helped women specifically with access to insurance (outside of their spouses), establishing preventative services, as well as lowering the overall cost of women’s healthcare.

Before the ACA, a major issue that was found with women’s healthcare, was that a large majority of women were not on their own insurance, but on their spouses instead. The problem that this created was that when women were divorced or widowed, they could be left without insurance coverage, or if they had insurance coverage, it was often not the same quality as the women had before. The Affordable Care Act helped to fix this by expanding the availability of insurance outside employer sponsored insurance, helping women gain access to more insurance options and overall giving them more security (Lee et al. 1).

Women’s health care is often more expensive, as more health care issues such as maternity care, birth control, among other things can be found. According to the article The Affordable Care Act: Addressing the Unique Health Needs of Women, women on average have higher out-of-pocket costs and less ability to pay due to overall lower wages than men (Lee et al. 1). The Affordable Care Act helped to provide inexpensive access to quality health care in order for women’s out-of-pocket costs to be more affordable to the beneficiary.

Before the Affordable Care Act, coverage for many health issues was not required by insurance, which created high out-of-pocket costs for the insurance beneficiary: preventative services would be a prime example of this. Preventative services are defined as routine health care that includes check-ups, patient counseling, and screenings to prevent illness, disease and other health-related problems. Before the Affordable Care Act, preventative services could come at a cost to the insurance beneficiary, but currently, things like screenings for breast and cervical cancer, contraceptives, counseling for domestic abuse, etc., are covered at no extra cost (Lee et al. 2). An Article from The Tribune Business News also highlights the importance of preventative care being covered under the Affordable Care Act (Stone). The coverage for preventative services isn’t only important to women’s healthcare, but every person's health care, as most people are susceptible to disease, and early detection can often be the best way to ensure a cure.

One thing that those who oppose the Affordable Care Act claim as a problem is employee mandated health insurance, but the health insurance is only required for a full time employee, and this is specifically helpful to women who have either recently been divorced, or who are the breadwinners within the family, as this means that they can supply insurance for themselves, as well as their families.

Another thing that those who oppose the Affordable Care Act use to argue against it is the higher taxes to citizens. The increased cost of taxes due to the Affordable Care Act hardly seem to be a large amount of money when you consider the amount of money spent on military expenses in the United States. According to an article from the National Priorities Project, 54 percent of federal spending goes toward military expenses, whereas a measly 6 percent goes towards Medicare and healthcare in the United States. Below is a pie graph from the same site that highlights this.

discretionary_spending_pie,_2015_enacted

Those who argue that the Affordable Care Act does more harm than good should educate themselves a little more, and realize that the Affordable Care Act has granted many access to affordable and quality health care, something that many didn’t have before.