Women stand to benefit substantially from true health-care reform because of their position in the family and in society, as well as certain gender-specific medical concerns.
In our society, more than 80 percent of heads of one-parent households are women, who must find health care for themselves and their children.Health insurance is often linked to marital status, a factor keeping some women in less than optimal personal situations, in part so they can retain that insurance for themselves and their children.
Battering is the single largest cause of injury to women, accounting for more emergency room visits than auto accidents, mugging and rape combined.
Women are more often than men the unpaid caregivers for elderly or disabled relatives living in the home. But they are many times without their own caregivers, when left widowed and chronically ill.
Women dominate occupations that are rarely insured: clerical, retail, home care, food service, housekeeping; they make up two-thirds of the part-time work force.
Whereas two-thirds of adults living in poverty are women, they constitute three-fourths of elderly adults living in poverty. If they are too young for Medicare, and are among half of the country's poor who do not receive Medicaid, they are forced to rely on the chronically underfunded public system.
Women are the fastest-growing segment of the population with HIV. They are disproportionately affected by certain chronic disabling diseases, among which are osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis and depression.
Reproductive functions require women to make use of the health-care system more than men. But only 30 percent of health insurance plans available today fully cover preventive services vital to women's health: Pap smears, breast exams, mammograms, prenatal care. Of the almost 2 million nursing home residents, 1.5 million are women.
Clearly, women's health is jeopardized by three major factors: social status, economic disadvantage and vulnerability to chronic disabling diseases.
It is also jeopardized by the present inadequate, inequitable system. What women and their dependents need is one that ensures lifelong access to the same level of care, regardless of age, marital status, employment status and prior health history; a system emphasizing preventive care and health education.
Such a system is the single-payer system, which removes the for-profit insurance industry from the health-care system once and for all. With all citizens covered by the same, single, nonprofit, public insurer, true universal access, with identical benefits for all will become a reality.
All citizens will benefit from a health-care system dedicated to the proposition that health care is a right, a social good, not a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace.
It's time for all Americans to stand up and take our health-care system back from those seeking only to profit at our expense.
(Dr. Barbara Newman, a family doctor, is chairwoman of The California Physicians Alliance.)