What do you know about Women’s Health?

This week I choose to talk about women’s healthcare. I felt inspired after reading some articles off of the well-known blog Our Bodies, Our Blogs which I did my link roundup with this past week. I also choose this topic because I feel like I don’t know much about women’s healthcare and being a woman I should probably know how our healthcare can effect my body and my life.

I read a post off of Huff Post Money that talked about how a survey in 2010 by Commonwealth Fund that women from the age of 19-43, 47% of them skip seeing the doctor or didn’t get medicine due to the high costs. I am still under my parents health insurance so i don’t ever really have to deal with not being able to go to the doctor when I really need, sometimes I just don’t go because I really just don’t like the doctor. There was also this complete study that was centered around two scientific telephone surveys conducted in 2010 that had data from surveys between 2001 2011, that American women have to pay $1 billion more then men every year on health insurance because women go to the doctor more then men do.

Later on in the article they talked about Obama and this bill he had passed called The Affordable Care Act, which should go into effective around 2014. I wanted to learned more about this Bill so I found an article by Ms. Blog that gives some insights into what will be in the bill.

• It says contraceptives will be covered, so millions more women will gain access to family planning.

• There will be basic benefits of preventive care like PAP tests and mammograms without any co-pays or deductibles

• There will be no “gender rating” when it comes to women in the workplace

• There will also be no more discrimination in favor of high –paid employees will be banned, no employers can not be able to give a lesser pay plan to lower-paid workers, this includes not only women but people of color

• Also abortions will not be covered by any federal subsidy or funding but individuals may buy insurance plans that offer abortion coverage, this means they have to pay with their own money for an abortion

After reading these articles I feel like I get a better sense of what is going on in women’s healthcare in America. I was happy to see that contraceptives were being covered and basic preventive care was to have no-copay of deductibles. My family even thought we have health insurance we don’t have great coverage so our co-pay is twice as much as many people I know. I feel happy that I don’t have to feel guilty about going to the doctors when my parents have to pay so much each time.

After all of this research I will admit I was ashamed I did not know all of these things about what is going on with women’s healthcare in our country. Being a young woman who will soon be living on her own in about a year I feel like I should have been better informed. I have always be a strong believer in women having choices and rights over her body but I have heard and seen incidents when this is not true I think now I will try to keep myself more informed on what is going on in women’s healthcare so I can continue the talk about what I think is important in women’s healthcare.