Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

I don't expect pork chops at a Jewish barbecue. I also never expected pork chops in my law school cafeteria. What does that have to do with my access to health care? It's a long story...

I decided to go to law school just months after being diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Scared, in pain, and facing a possible progression of my condition, I realized if I was going to go to law school, I had to go now. I started to research law schools and quickly realized something — I didn't really have a choice of schools.

The fibromyalgia diagnosis meant I couldn't give up my health insurance — student insurance may not have covered my needs. Keeping my health insurance meant I couldn't give up my job. Luckily, I lived in a metropolitan area with four top tier law schools offering part-time programs. Great! Except two of the schools were too far from work for me to make it on time for classes. So that leaves two options.

At this point, it's November 2003. I don't have time to study for the December LSAT exam, so I register for the February exam and plan to apply for the 2004-05 school year. Great! Except one of the two remaining schools won't accept the February exam for this application cycle. I could wait a year, but when you're terrified that you might wake up one day with so much pain that you will have to file for disability, a year is a very long time. So I apply to the remaining option.

Last September, my sister marked the 6th anniversary of her breast cancer diagnosis when she was only 24. Thanks to knowledge about self-exams and a kick in the butt from our family's medical history, my sister knew she needed to see a doctor. Thanks to excellent medical insurance, she was able to catch her cancer early, and pursue the course of treatment her doctors recommended.

My sister was lucky. She was employed full-time with great insurance. Seeing a doctor for a breast exam wasn't out of her reach financially and thank goodness, neither was surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy.

But for too many women, the medical treatment my sister received is an economic impossibility. Nineteen million women had no health insurance in 2010, and in 2005, when my sister was diagnosed, the Affordable Care Act wasn’t there to allow adults under 26 to stay on their parents’ health plans. As of yesterday, the life-saving treatment my sister received is even more out of reach for low-income and uninsured women.

That's because yesterday the Planned Parenthood Federation of American announced that Susan G. Komen for the Cure has withdrawn its financial support, cutting off 19 affiliates from grant money supporting breast cancer screening. In Orange County, California, Komen money supported the local affiliate's initiative to provide breast health education to Vietnamese women. In Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming, $165,000 slashed from the Rocky Mountain affiliate's budget means hundreds of women won't get screened for breast cancer. And in Clallam County, Washington, losing Komen money means losing funding for the local affiliate’s mobile clinic that provided breast cancer screening for 400 under-served and isolated women last year.

In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama emphasized a vital point: that unfair, and even counter-productive, tax breaks for corporations and the very wealthy shortchange needed investments for women and their families.

Tell your Members of Congress to make millionaires and corporations pay their fair share, to protect vital programs and to create jobs for the millions of struggling Americans who need them.

Instead of showering tax breaks on the wealthy, the oil and gas industry and on corporations that ship American jobs overseas, Congress needs to:

Protect vital programs: Women and their families depend on federal programs to protect their health, get quality child care, attend college, and meet their basic needs during difficult times and as they age. We need to protect vital programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, child care, Head Start, and Food Stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).

Create jobs: Unemployment remains painfully high, and while job growth has started to pick up, millions of women and men are still struggling to find jobs. We must extend federal emergency unemployment benefits to help people who are hurting now and invest in programs that put women and men back to work.