House of Representatives

Even before the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the health care law is constitutional, opponents of the law already had decided that they were going to repeal it. To make matters worse, they have no plan to ensure that women and their families have access to quality, affordable health care.

They say it's about policy. It is — a policy of putting politics above the health of women and their families.

Tell your Member of Congress to oppose repealing the health care law.

The health care law is already providing people with pre-existing conditions access to health care coverage. Read more »

By now you’ve probably heard about the Supreme Court decision on the new health care law, but with all of the news stories focusing on political candidates’ reactions and Supreme Court gossip, you would be forgiven if you don’t know what this decision actually means for you and your family. Thankfully, we’re here to help. To find out more about what the decision means for women’s health, check out our new Frequently Asked Questions.

The short of it is, all of the new protections we’ve been telling you about for two years will remain in place!

• No longer will you be charged more for coverage just because you are a woman or denied coverage because you have a history of breast cancer.

“It is unconscionable that someone would come into my city from the outside and try to impose a law that doesn’t represent the best interests of anyone, especially families like mine. This proposed law is downright cruel, as it would inflict pain on the families, the women, and the babies it purports to protect.” –Christy Zink

It’s round three in the Judiciary Committee. Last Thursday, Trent Franks (R-AZ) held yet another hearing on yet another bill that is aimed at denying women access to a constitutional right. This time the bill in discussion, the D.C. Abortion Ban (H.R. 3803), seeks to impose a ban on almost all abortions 20 weeks post-fertilization. The only exception to the ban is to save the life of the mother, and even that exception is restricted to when the mother faces physical life-threatening problems (being suicidal is apparently not life-threatening…). It is unconstitutional because it bans abortions pre-viability and fails to include any exception for health.

Oh, and did I mention that the bill only affects D.C. (a population who has no voting representative in Congress)?

The hearing began with a brief tangling over whether the only popularly-elected official for DC would get to testify on a bill that only affects DC. After the kerfuffle ended (with Rep. Franks again refusing to allow Rep. Norton Holmes to testify), the four witnesses gave their testimony. Read more »

Did you know…

• DC has the smallest gender wage gap, while Wyoming has the largest.
• Mississippi has the highest rate of child poverty, New Hampshire has the lowest.
• Texas has the highest percentage of non-elderly adult women who don’t have health insurance, while Massachusetts has the lowest.

These facts aren’t trivia; they have important implications for public debate and public policy. And they all come from the American Community Survey (ACS) a dataset that almost all House Republicans and a handful of House Democrats voted to eliminate last week.  

The ACS is invaluable to researchers, businesses, non-profits and the government. The ACS is the only source of annual data on the social, economic, and demographic characteristics of our country down to the neighborhood level.

The arguments to eliminate the ACS are tenuous at best. Some policy makers, like Congressman Daniel Webster (R-FL), have stated that the survey is a violation of privacy. This is simply ludicrous – the Census Bureau takes extreme caution to make sure that all survey results are confidential. No one’s responses are identifiable – from looking at the public data, it is impossible to tell who answered a survey question a specific way. Read more »

This blog post is a part of NWLC’s Mother’s Day 2012 blog series. For all our Mother’s Day posts, please click here.

My whole life, whenever I would thank my mom for doing something for me (or on those few occasions when I might grumble that she was being a little overprotective), she would always respond, “that’s what they pay me for.”

What she was really saying is that picking me up from school in the middle of the day because I was sick, or helping me with homework assignments, or asking if I was eating enough calcium (yes, Mom) was all part of being a parent. But I know that no one ever paid my mom to mother, even though it is hard and extremely expensive work.

So while there was no motherhood bureau paying my mom for raising her daughters, her employer was paying her a living wage with benefits.

Unfortunately, not every mother receives a living wage or benefits like paid vacation time to attend parent-teacher conferences and school plays, or health insurance to care for themselves and their children. Between the gender wage gap, the concentration of women in low-paying jobs, and a slow economic recovery for women, too many moms are parenting on nickels and dimes.

The millions of women who lived in poverty in 2010 aren’t thrilled about it, neither are the hundreds of thousands of women who lost their public sector jobs in the last two years, but a large portion of Congress doesn’t seem to care about struggling families. Read more »

In an unsurprising but discouraging vote yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a budget bill to implement components of the FY 2013 budget resolution introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). 218 Members of Congress, all Republicans, voted in favor of the bill, which would slash funding for Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), child care, the Affordable Care Act, and more. (Sixteen Republicans and 183 Democrats voted no.)

Supporters have asserted that these drastic cuts – which would cripple programs that are vital to low-income women and their families – are necessary to avoid the automatic cuts (known as the “sequester”) scheduled to take effect in 2013 under the Budget Control Act. New revenue from the wealthiest individuals and corporations would be a far better way to replace the sequester, but the bill that passed the House does not ask for one penny from those who could actually afford to contribute to deficit reduction. Read more »

The ranking member on the House Budget Committee, Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) introduced an alternative to the appalling budget bill the House is voting on and expected to pass today. Rep. Van Hollen’s proposal also would avert the automatic across-the-board cuts to defense and non-defense programs that are scheduled to take effect in January 2013. But instead of slashing Medicaid, Food Stamps, child care, and dismantling the Affordable Care Act, Van Hollen’s alternative would have produced savings by eliminating taxpayer subsidies for big oil, cutting unnecessary agriculture subsidies, and adopting the Buffett Rule to ensure that millionaires pay their fair share of taxes.

House members won’t be able to vote today on Rep. Van Hollen’s bill. The House Rules Committee refused to allow it. Read more »

Take Action: Tell Your Representative to Vote NO

Protect millions of women and families from the harsh spending cuts the House is voting on this week.

They just never stop.

Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed the budget blueprint introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). The Ryan budget calls for drastic cuts in programs that low-income women and their families depend on to meet their basic needs — and trillions of dollars in additional tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and corporations.

This week, the House will vote on a bill to implement the Ryan budget by slashing Medicaid, Food Stamps (SNAP), child care, and more, and dismantling the Affordable Care Act.

Please contact your Representative TODAY and tell him or her to vote against these devastating cuts!

The bill the House is scheduled to vote on this Thursday, H.R. 4966, would:

• Let states reduce eligibility standards for Medicaid, which women disproportionately rely on for health care coverage, and for the Children's Health Insurance Program.
• Dismantle the Affordable Care Act, by eliminating funding for state health exchanges and community-level preventive and public health initiatives, and by reducing access to affordable health insurance coverage by discouraging the use of premium tax credits.
• Terminate the Social Services Block Grant, which gives billions of dollars to states to support seniors and children, including critical funding for child care assistance.
• Cut Food Stamp (SNAP) benefits, reducing monthly benefits almost immediately for about 44 million people and denying benefits altogether for as many as 2 million more.
• Eliminate eligibility for the refundable Child Tax Credit for many immigrant families.

Who knew we needed a law to protect pregnant women from being fired for taking a bathroom break or drinking water on the job? Speakers at today’s press conference after the introduction of the Pregnancy Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) highlighted the reality many women face in ultimately having to choose between a healthy pregnancy and their job.

At the press conference bill sponsor, Representative Nadler (D-NY), described cases where the law has failed to protect pregnant workers. Rep. Nadler stated what should be the obvious: that the economic devastation of a pregnant woman losing her job impacts not only her, but her family and the employer as well.

NWLC’s Emily Martin spoke at the conference. Martin explained how some courts have limited the protections set out in current law, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA).

Martin, pictured above, described the gap courts have created between the PDA and Americans with Disabilities Act, which leaves pregnant workers unprotected when they need accommodations during ordinary pregnancy, such as avoiding lifting heavy objects in the last 6 weeks. The result, Martin explained, is that women “are losing their jobs because employers refuse to make temporary modifications to allow women to perform their jobs safely.”

On Sunday, Speaker Boehner defended the House of Representatives’ recent vote to eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Trust Fund to cover the cost of maintaining today’s low interest rates for student loans. Arguing that the Obama Administration and women’s health advocates have created a controversy out of whole cloth, the Speaker said, “I’ll guarantee you that they’ve not spent a dime of this fund dealing with anything to do with women’s health.”

Perhaps the Speaker is not aware that the top three causes of death among American women are heart disease, cancer and stroke. Or that the Prevention and Public Health Trust Fund – a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that ensures adequate funding for preventive health initiatives – already helps communities use evidence-based programs that reduce chronic disease and prevent heart attacks, cancer, and stroke, among other conditions. Other Prevention Fund initiatives fund efforts to improve nutrition and increase physical activity to reduce obesity-related conditions, such as diabetes, and expand immunization services, including immunization against influence and pneumonia – numbers seven and eight, respectively among the leading causes of death among women. Finally, Prevention Fund investments include improving detection of and early intervention in Alzheimer’s Disease, which occupies position number five on the top-ten list. Read more »