Health care coverage is back in the spotlight, in the wake of growing costs and increasing numbers of uninsured individuals. Public opinion polls show that the majority of all Americans, and women in particular, believe that addressing health care issues should be one of the nation’s top priorities.
Currently, there are 46.6 million Americans without health insurance. (1) And though women are more likely than men to have health coverage, both insured and uninsured women are more likely than men to report difficulty obtaining health care because of cost.
The Commonwealth Fund and the National Women’s Law Center have jointly authored an issue brief entitled Women and Health Coverage: The Affordability Gap, which explores the difficulties women face in obtaining and affording health insurance. The National Womens Law Center's companion issue brief, Women and Health Coverage: A Framework for Moving Forward, evaluates efforts to expand health insurance in terms of their potential to address the particular challenges women face. Together these briefs demonstrate that the unmet health needs of women in this country are great, that reforms can be designed to meet the needs of women and that there is great variation among the proposals on the table with respect to their ability to meet women’s needs.
1. In the issue briefs, "Women and Health Coverage: The Affordability Gap," and "Women and Health Coverage: A Framework for Moving Forward," this number is listed as 44.8 million. That figure has since been updated to 46.6 million (Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette Proctor, Cheryl Hill Lee, US Census Bureau, "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States, 2005," August 2006, available at http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/p60-231.pdf, accessed October 2, 2007).