By Marianna Levyash-Talk Radio News Service

The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), a non-profit organization that protects women’s legal rights, held a news conference Tuesday morning, announcing their new public awareness campaign titled “Being a Woman is Not a Pre-Existing Condition.”

The NWLC found that many women pay more than men and get less coverage than they need, a practice called gender rating.

Women may also be denied coverage because of “pre-existing conditions”, such as having a cesarean section or surviving domestic abuse.

“Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) is right now circulating a dear colleague letter to the Senate Leadership to ensure that the merged health reform legislation will ban gender rating for all groups regardless of size,” announced NWLC Co-President Marcia D. Greenberger.

The campaign includes a new website, video, newly designed t-shirts, and events that provide information to help both men and women understand how important it is for women to have affordable and beneficial health care.

The goal of the NWLC is to teach women about health care coverage and unite them to contact their members of Congress to call for health care reform legislation that works for women.

“The need is as urgent today as when we issued our first report one year ago…today we release the center’s new report, still nowhere to turn,” said Greenberger.

Those who wish to join the campaign can visit www.awomanisnotapreexistingcondition.com to get more information.

John DuBois, University of New Mexico/Talk Radio News Service

According to a group of female U.S. Senators, women have to pay one and a half times more for health insurance than men nationwide. In addition, the Senators said that women tend to need more hospital care then men making them more susceptible to higher rates.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Barbara Mikulski (D-M.D.), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) spoke at an event called “Standing Up For Women’s Health” Thursday along side National Women’s Law Center Co-President Marcia Greenberger.

“If we look at statistics, its estimated 64 million women lack….health insurance. Over half of medical bankruptcies are filled by female headed households. [For} too many women and their families, getting quality healthcare is not available for them today,” Shaheen said.

“Women want healthcare reform and they want it now,” Klobuchar said.

The Senators said that the majority of individual health insurance policies in the U.S. do not cover maternity care because it is considered to be a pre-existing condition.

“As you think of these women who are already battered and in a weak and vulnerable state and to find out they can’t even go see a doctor which is a part of their recovery and they can’t even mend because they have been domestically abused. This is why it’s important to get rid of these pre-existing condition rules,” Klobuchar said.

By Mariko Lamb- Talk Radio News Service

Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md) praised the Affordable Health Choices Act that passed through the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) Wednesday.

“We’re not going to sit with the status quo. We’re moving ahead with healthcare reform,” said Senator Harkin.

“[The bill] offers to fix what is broken in our healthcare system without ruining that which works in our nation,” said Dodd. “It offers every American choice, stability, and lower costs.”

Although the bill passed through the committee with a 13-10 vote, not one Republican member voted in favor of the legislation. Regardless, Dodd praised the Republicans’ contribution to the markup of the bill, which includes 160 Republican added amendments. “I know that some of our Republican friends don’t want to admit their contribution, but they made good contributions to the bill, and we listened,” he said.

“Now is the time to rejoice on what we’ve done, but the battle must go on,” said Mikulski. HELP’s Affordable Health Choices Act is expected to be merged with a healthcare bill by the Senate Finance Committee, which is under pressure from President Obama to release its version as early as next week.

Chairwoman of Senate Committee on Appropriations Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) compares the current drug problems the U.S faces to the H1N1 pandemic, and this “insatiable demand” only helps to fund enemies abroad, like the Taliban and Mexican drug cartels. (0:35)

 

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By Celia Canon Talk Radio News Service

It is still unclear whether prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility will be transferred to military prisons in the United States. That was the message given to top members of Congress today by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who testified for two hours before the Committee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies to discuss Department of Justice budget priorities.

Closing the prison “require(s) immediate interagency action,” Holder said. “While implementing these (Presidential) orders, the Department will take necessary precautions to ensure decisions regarding Guantanamo detainees account for (the) safety concerns of all Americans. Executing these orders will have a significant workload and cost impact on the Department and this budget reflects what is needed.”

In January, President Barack Obama announced that he will fulfill his campaign promise to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The facility is slated to close within a year of Obama’s announcement, and it is up to the Justice Department to find detention locations for the prisoners, most of whom have been imprisoned for years as suspected terrorists.

The Committee was concerned with Holder’s $30 million request to close the prison, perhaps because Holder did not confirm or deny his authority to allow the detainees to be transferred and housed in the U.S.

Committee Chair Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) said DOJ is suffering from a lack of morale and trust. “I want to know how the Department of Justice has improved accountability of taxpayer dollars so that every dollar spent to secure our communities is a dollar well spent… Spending excesses will not be tolerated.”

Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said that “the very idea of taking money from victims and law enforcing officers to educate and comfort terrorists, pedophiles and career criminals, I think, is an abomination.”

Critics of Obama’s decision fear that housing suspected terrorists on U.S. soil opens the country to terrorist attacks.

On the safety of Americans, who could potentially live near former Guantanamo detainees, Mikulski said that while international law must be upheld, “we have to make sure that streets and neighborhoods don’t think that they are going to be the repository of Guantanamo prisoners.”

Holder replied: “I will work to strengthen the activities of the federal government to protect the American people from terrorism. I will use every available tactic to defeat our adversaries, and I will do so within the letter and the spirit of our Constitution.”

Coffee Brown,MD University of New Mexico, for Talk Radio News Service

At a Senate hearing on implementing best patient care practices chaired by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), experts testified that lives can be saved by a system to evaluate, disseminate, and promote best practices in healthcare. The panel included four physician researchers known for their work on various aspects of best practices.
Dr. Peter J. Pronovost is credited with saving thousands of lives and millions of dollars at Johns Hopkins by instituting medical checklists modeled after those used by the airline industry. He also endorses public-private systems to adapt product design to reduce healthcare accidents.
Dr. Steven D. Pearson works on measures of effectiveness. He favors reimbursement strategies to promote provider adoption of identified best practices. Regulations, he said, are big and slow to respond to respond to changing science. Motivating doctors through reimbursement gets better results faster, and is easier to adapt to moving targets. He clarified for Mikulski that “comparative outcomes” compares options available, whereas “best practices” compares systems. They are not synonyms and are not managed the same way.
Dr. Donald R. Fischer ,Chief Medical Officer for Blue Cross Blue Shield, said data show that preventive employee health, promoting healthy practices through the workplace, returns more money than it costs. In the example he cited, about $1.64 was saved or returned for each dollar spent.
A striking case for using new technology for preventive medicine was presented by Dr. Jeff Gulcher, who had unsuspected cancer detected and treated early because of a new genetic screening test. He had no suggestive family history, and neither do a lot of other people with significant genetic risk, he said. Genomic testing will help to individualize both prevention and treatment strategies.
All four physicians agreed that NIH should dedicate at least five percent of its budget to the study of the healthcare delivery system itself, as opposed to medical research per se’.

 

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Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) says she is looking forward to having Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) back in the Senate. Today was the first day that Sen. Clinton has been back to the Senate since suspending her presidential campaign on June 7, 2008. (0:16)

 

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