Got Prevention? Get Some.

Happy National Women's Health Week!

This week we will be focusing on women’s health. There is good news and bad news. I'll start with the bad news. Our nation continues to fall short of adopting policies that will improve women's health. The 2010 edition of Making the Grade on Women's Health: A National and State-by-State Report Card shows that despite some progress on individual indicators, the vast majority of states failed to make significant advances to meet women's health needs. In fact, progress in some states is not only slow, it's at a standstill. That is, of course, the bad news.

Now let's turn to the good news. There are many areas where we as a nation can improve. Fortunately, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers several new tools to help us. One of the most important aspects of the health care law is the emphasis on preventing disease. Under the health care law, all new health plans are required to cover important preventative health services for women, at no additional cost, such as copayments and deductibles, to consumers. Moving forward, women will be able to receive free preventative health measures such as mammograms, smoking cessation services, colon cancer screenings, and flu shots.

The reason this is such good news is that by focusing on prevention, we have the opportunity to make progress to improve women's health across the nation. On one hand, the Report Card details upsetting trends. For example, there has been considerable decline in the percentage of women who receive a pap test, the primary way to detect cervical cancer. Yet because the health care law emphasizes prevention, we have a huge chance to reverse this trend and ensure women receive necessary pap tests and other preventative services at no additional cost.

The Report Card shows us that when we don't take prevention seriously, we fail. The health care law is a way to make the grade.