DeLauro Anoints Messengers”

IMG_8011.JPGAs a critical health care vote neared in D.C., Rosa DeLauro came home to urge activists to keep up the pressure so that women’s concerns make the cut in a final reform bill.

The executive director of Connecticut’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, Teresa C. Younger (on right with DeLauro), was among two dozen people who gathered with the U.S. Third Ditrict Congresswoman for a breakfast meeting at the Graduate Club on Elm Street.

She heard DeLauro declare, Despite what you may be hearing in some quarters, the Congress will pass health reform this year. The stakes are too high. It’s going to happen.”

The Senate Finance Committee was voting on a bill Tuesday. Meanwhile, DeLauro said, the three bills emerging from House of Representatives committees are 85 percent reconciled. The final House bill, to surface as soon as the end of this week, will include a government-run public option” insurance plan, she said.

She said it has a lot of other good elements already, such as barring companies from denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions. She said more of the health care dollar will go toward care rather than administration.

Specifically for women, the House bills mandate more maternity coverage (79 percent of women’s’ policies currently don’t have maternity coverage); and more prenatal, maternal, and infant coverage.

There also would be coverage for mammograms. One in five women don’t have that test because they can’t afford it, with often terrible cancer outcomes due to late discovery, she said. DeLauro’s enumeration included help for victims of domestic violence.

IMG_8021.JPGDeLauro added, regarding insurance rates, If you happen to be born a woman you shouldn’t be charged 48 percent more.” She said the bill would address gender-rating,” which is now practiced in all but 11 states.

Several speakers, including Younger, suggested that activists frame the bill as a whole as a women’s issue.

Health care reform is the women’s issue in the country,” said Younger. Women cannot get to equality until we get health care reform.”

Yale researcher Dr. Carolyn Mazure said women are the greatest utilizers of health care, and are more often than men the victims of ineffective treatment.

Mazure said women live longer, with reproductive health problems continuing long after menopause. They suffer from more chronic disease, and more ineffective treatment. 

According to a recent study women with chest pain receive aspirin and other treatment en route to the hospital at a lower rate than men, she added. That’s shouldn’t be, she said.

IMG_8016.JPGSurgeon Dr. Nina Horowitz (pictured) said she can’t understand why an MRI for breast cancer is covered — but only one, no follow-up procedure. Nor why many insurance policies cover Viagra but not birth control.

DeLauro concurred that the health reform story is indeed a woman’s story. But not exclusively, she said.

In general reform proposals have not been well explained to the American people, either as a women’s issue, or as issue affecting, for example, older people, she said.

Older people think the reform is the worst that can happen. The story has not been well told.”

DeLauro called on the women assembled to keep up their advocacy, and more.

You’re advocates, but we need messengers” at this juncture, DeLauro said. Senators especially need to hear from supporters of reform, she said.

The Tuesday forum was part of a series of DeLauro-arranged gatherings on health care. She met Monday with a group of older people in Wallingford. On Wednesday the congresswoman will conduct a teletown meeting” from Washington. To connect to that and for more details on DeLauro and the emerging health bill, click here.

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