What’s at Stake: How Repealing the New Health Care Law will Hurt Women and Families

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve probably heard that the top priority of the new Speaker of the House is to repeal the new health care law. Doesn’t sound like that big of a deal? Are you thinking what happens in Washington doesn’t affect you? Think again.

Americans just like you are already benefiting from the changes in the new health care law. Children who couldn’t get insurance because of a pre-existing condition can no longer be denied coverage and women are already accessing important preventive services such as mammograms and pap smears at no cost.

Repealing the law will return us to the days when women were treated like a pre-existing condition. Insurance companies will be allowed to drop coverage when an enrollee gets sick and deny women coverage if they’ve had a C-section, breast or cervical cancer, or received medical treatment for domestic or sexual violence. Repeal will keep 11 million women from receiving subsidies to help them buy affordable health insurance and prevent 4.5 million low-income women from becoming eligible for coverage through Medicaid.

And this is just the beginning. The bottom line is that repealing the health care law will allow discriminatory insurance industry practices to continue and make health insurance harder to obtain and afford. To find out what’s at stake where you live, take a look at our state-by-state fact sheets.