Health Reform Is in the Making, Starting Now

By Sue Dunlap and Adrianne Black

WeNews commentators

Friday, October 1, 2010

As health reform starts taking effect, Sue Dunlap and Adrianne Black are hosting a conference to stir involvement among caregivers and consumers. Medicaid and abortion both show how much a law can change through its implementation.

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Lessons from History

The history of Medicaid shows why the time is right for sustained involvement and advocacy in preventive and reproductive health care in the health care system that is starting to emerge.

Today it is a much broader, and much stronger, safety net than the outline Lyndon Johnson signed into law as part of the Great Society.

The state and federal partnership to cover needy Americans now includes more than 5 million women of childbearing age. And 70 percent of those enrolled over age 15 are women.

Starting 10 years ago, low-income women not otherwise eligible for Medicaid gained access through the program to treatment for breast or cervical cancer. What made this improvement possible? Sustained pressure by patients, health caregivers and allies who listened.

Access to safe and legal abortion holds a similar lesson. The 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade recognized a basic privacy right for women in deciding whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in its first three months. The decision almost immediately shifted abortions from dangerous, self-induced or unsanitary conditions to medically supervised, less costly and safe clinical settings. Women's injury and death rates plummeted.

Only sustained advocacy and organizing has preserved the core of this basic right against attacks in and outside the law. And continued involvement will be needed to overcome a recent decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to go beyond the text of the new reform law and bar abortion coverage to some poor women under one of its provisions.

The new reform law is slow to take effect and imperfect in its provisions.

But the concrete protections it puts in force and the improvements in care that it sets in motion are big advances for Americans, especially women. Like the fruit trees we grow by the thousands here in California, this one promises great bounty well into the future if we know its potential and stay around to help it flourish.

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Sue Dunlap and Adrianne Black are co-CEOs of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, the largest provider of reproductive health care in the largest county in the nation, serving more than 120,000 women and men each year.

For more information:

Women and Health Care Reform
Tuesday Oct. 5: 1:30 to 5:00 p.m
The California Endowment, 1000 Alameda Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
RSVP to betsy.cardenas@pp-la.org or (213) 514-2167

Sponsored by Planned Parenthood Los Angles, Black Women for Wellness, California Black Women's Health Project, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, Los Angeles County Department of Public Heath, Office of Women's Health, National Health Law Project and The Saban Free Clinic.