WASHINGTON— From a return to higher premiums based on gender, to gaps in coverage for birth control and breast pumps, experts say women could end up paying more for less if the Obama-era health care law is repealed.
The 2010 law ended a common industry practice of charging women more than men for policies purchased directly from an insurer. It made maternity and newborn care a required benefit for individual health plans. And it set a list of preventive services to be provided at no extra cost to women, including birth control and breast pumps used by nursing mothers. That preventive care requirement also applies to most employer plans.
Nearly half of pregnancies are unplanned, and prior to “Obamacare” some women would get pregnant only to learn that their insurance did not cover maternity and delivery, said Dr. John Meigs, a longtime family practitioner in the small town of Centerville, Alabama.
“A lot of women were delaying their prenatal care until they could figure out what to do,” said Meigs, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Pregnancy “is one of those things that ought to be covered, because it happens.”
Democrats are keying in on the issue as they try to block or blunt the GOP drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “We don’t want our country going backward when it comes to women’s health,” said Sen. Patty Murray, ranking Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Women are widely seen as having benefited from the health law. In a recent AP-NORC poll, 44 percent said they thought women were better off as a result of the law, while only 24 percent said women were worse off.
“The ACA set minimum levels of benefits that health plans have to cover and many are highly used, or exclusively used by women,” said Usha Ranji, a health policy expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. “Repeal and replace could take away that minimum level of benefits, which includes really commonly used services like contraception and maternity care.”
