« May 2018 Issue
New Program Aims to Protect and Improve Women’s Health Care
This February, Community Catalyst launched the Women’s Health Program, an exciting next step building upon 10 years of close partnership with MergerWatch and its collaborators in the Raising Women’s Voices for the Health Care We Need initiative. We spoke with Kate Villers, president and founder of Community Catalyst, and Lois Uttley, director of the Women’s Health Program, about why the new program is an important advocacy opportunity for Community Catalyst.
According to Villers, Republican efforts to repeal the ACA, as well as an onslaught of attacks on reproductive rights on the federal and state levels, mean that “women are being particularly shortchanged by the health care system.” Restrictions on access to care are especially affecting low-income women, women of color, immigrants and those who are part of the LGBTQ community. The creation of the Women’s Health Program significantly strengthens Community Catalyst’s ability to respond to these threats and provide the support that women need to secure their rights to health care.
Uttley thinks that the values of both MergerWatch and the Raising Women’s Voices initiative are well suited for a partnership with Community Catalyst: “Like Community Catalyst, we strongly believe that patients know best what is wrong with the health system and what it would take to fix the problems. We need to work from the ground up.”
Putting patients’ rights first was the main priority of MergerWatch, which Uttley founded in 1997 to help grassroots coalitions fight to protect health care services that were being threatened by proposed hospital mergers. The project initially focused on protecting access to reproductive health services at non-religious hospitals merging with religiously-sponsored facilities that prohibit such care. MergerWatch laid important groundwork for the Women’s Health program at Community Catalyst by advocating for practices, policies and systems that ensure medical care is guided by scientifically-accurate, unbiased medical information, and a sensitivity for each patient’s own religious or ethical beliefs.
The Women’s Health Program is now one of the three national entities co-coordinating Raising Women’s Voices, along with the Black Women’s Health Imperative and the National Women’s Health Network. Raising Women’s Voices, founded in 2007, now has a network of 30 regional coordinators in 29 states. They advocated for inclusion of key provisions for women’s health in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), such as required coverage of maternity care and of contraception with no co-pays, as well as prohibitions on charging women more than men are charged for the same health plan.
However, the work did not end there. As the ACA was being implemented, there were further barriers for newly-enrolled women who were figuring out how to navigate the health system to get the care they needed. Uttley recalls, “We worked hard to get women enrolled. Then we started to hear from regional coordinators that women who had enrolled didn’t know how to use their health insurance. They were asking questions like, ‘what is a deductible?’ and ‘what is coinsurance?’” Raising Women’s Voices worked closely with regional coordinators to address these concerns with a health insurance literacy campaign called “My Health, My Voice.” The campaign produced and distributed thousands of copies of “A Woman’s Step-by-Step Guide to Using Health Insurance” and a personal health journal, as well as fact sheets that explain confusing concepts and vocabulary and share strategies on how to keep track of personal health. These materials are available online at www.MyHealthMyVoice.com
The Women’s Health Program is continuing to advocate for better health policy, and is able to reach an even broader audience through social media. Recently, in response to President Trump’s proposed rule that would make it easier for providers to use “religious, moral or personal” beliefs to deny essential care and services to women, LGBTQ people and others, the Women’s Health Program created a Twitter storm using the hashtag #DontDenyUsCare. The campaign went viral and reached 1,473,865 people, sending 1,878 people to the HHS page to submit comments and 105 messages to members of Congress opposing the refusal clause. The success of this short campaign speaks to the energy and reach that the Women’s Health Program has when responding to barriers to health equity. Moving forward, the program can build upon these same strategies to work with consumers and advocacy partners to address further attacks on health care.
Villers says that there are multiple dimensions to the importance of the Women’s Health Program, stressing that women should have a central place in the broader health care reform movement. “Women are not just denied certain services,” she explained. “They also can’t afford health care. They can’t pay for health care for their kids, and they give up jobs to be caretakers.” Uttley echoes this conviction, saying that the Women’s Health Program at Community Catalyst is now poised to help place women’s health in the center of the consumer health movement - “as it should be.”
Priyanka Padidam is an intern with the communications team at Community Catalyst. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Tufts University where she studied Community Health and English.