Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

Yesterday morning’s breakfast forum, hosted by the Washington Post, brought together governors and education commissioners from several states to raise awareness of the importance of reading well by the third grade. Multiple studies show that high-quality early education programs lead to higher reading achievement, in addition to numerous other benefits (Carolina Abecedarian Project,  Chicago Child-Parent Centers [PDF], and High/Scope Perry Preschool [PDF]). Several of the participants, including Delaware Governor Jack Markell, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, Washington State Superintendent Randy Dorn, and Maryland State Superintendent Lillian Lowry, acknowledged this powerful evidence and the important role that early learning opportunities play in providing for successful literacy growth. High-quality early childhood education was referred to as a “game changer,” an “effective effort to improve reading,” and a way to “success[fully] narrow the achievement gap.”

When I was teaching, I taught a brilliant student named Aiya. I had lots of brilliant students, but Aiya was one of those incredibly rare nine-year-olds who reads at least a novel a day and remembers everything you tell her. Every afternoon she would take a book home and read it aloud to her 4-year-old sister Amani. Amani was in Ms. McClure’s Prekindergarten class (which was just down the hall) and she loved to stop by our classroom to tell us what the letter of the day was, or sing us whatever number song she had learned that morning.

Then one day Aiya and Amani stopped coming to school. I called home – no answer. Eventually I found out that they had been in danger. Without going into too many details, their mother needed to urgently withdraw the girls from school and take them out of state. About 2 months later they were back!  When I saw those two little smiling ladies get off of bus 77 I thought my heart would burst with happiness.

But there was a problem – a big problem.

Strong federal protections against sex discrimination exist in the workplace and in schools, and have existed, for sixty and forty years, respectively. Of course, there’s a lot of work to do to enforce those protections and build on them. In health care, no such broad antidiscrimination law existed.

You may need to re-read that. People generally do a double-take when they hear there has been no big prohibition against sex discrimination in health care until just 3 years ago. “Did I really read that right??” You did.

We needed a Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education program, for health care. Finally, now, we got one!

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) adds this important protection against sex discrimination in health care. But, that’s not all.

For one, Section 1557 expands existing protections against discrimination in the health care area based on race, color, national origin, disability, and age. Specifically, the law protects individuals from discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age, disability, gender identity, and sex stereotypes in:

• the health programs or activities of recipients of federal financial assistance, like all operations of a hospital or the health plans of entities that receive federal grants;
• federally-administered programs, such as Medicare or the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan; or
• any entity established under Title I of the ACA, including the health insurance exchanges being established in the states—the places people will go to compare their options for and purchase health insurance

Or, put more simply: the law’s reach is broad and impacts virtually all aspects of health care.