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The Senate’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC) has released a report examining the basic facts regarding women’s insurance coverage, including how women’s health is affected by the shortcomings of the current system.

In the words of the accompanying press release, the report, titled “Comprehensive Health Insurance Reform: An Essential Prescription for Women,” (Aug. 6, 2009, pdf) “reveals that during the recession, women are experiencing a double-whammy of lost health insurance as they lose their insurance due to either their own or their spouse’s job loss.” It also “chronicles the vulnerability created by women’s dependence on their spouse’s employer-sponsored health insurance, the unique risk of un-insurance for younger and older women, and the spike in newly uninsured children of unemployed single mothers.”

“Many of the findings of this report apply to direct-care workers,” said Carol Regan, PHI Director of Government Affairs. “PHI’s Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign has shown that because direct-care workers are mostly middle-aged and older women the cost of coverage — for them and for their employers — is unaffordable.”

Key findings in the JEC report include the following:

• Over 1.4 million women have lost their health insurance since the start of the recession in December 2007. Over 70 percent of these cases were due to a spouse’s job loss.
• JEC estimates show at least 121,000 children have lost health coverage due to job losses by single mothers.
• Women aged 55 to 64 inhabit a zone of particular danger for lost health benefits because they don’t yet qualify for Medicare even though their husbands are transitioning to it from employer-sponsored care.
• Lack of insurance is a particular problem among younger women. Almost 30 percent of women aged 19 to 24 lack health insurance. Much of this is due to the terrible job market.
• Lack of insurance is also a particular problem among low-income women. 41 percent have no coverage, and state budget troubles are leading to increasingly stiff eligibility rules for Medicaid.
• Women suffer more serious consequences than men do, both economically and health-wise, from inadequate coverage.

Regarding a solution, the JEC strongly supports comprehensive health reform of the sort currently being debated by Congress and the American public. It says such reform is “critical to women’s physical and financial health. By simultaneously addressing coverage issues and health care costs, Congress will be tackling two problems that weigh heavily on women and their families — lack of access to affordable coverage and skyrocketing medical costs for those who do have insurance.”

The JEC specifically endorses a number of suggested solutions, including bans on gender ratings and pre-existing condition exclusions; the creation of health insurance “exchanges”; out-of-pocket spending caps; Medicaid expansions; public subsidies for middle-income health coverage; and creation of a public insurance option.

At a press conference for the report’s release, JEC member Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) said,

Our current health system — the most expensive in the world — needs urgent surgery to insure women, especially those most grievously affected by the recession, receive equal care. For far too many women and their families, quality, affordable health care is out of reach. More than two out of every five low income women today lack health care insurance. With urgent warnings about a renewal of swine flu this fall and steep declines threatening even deeper cuts in state Medicaid funding, it is critical for us to act.