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Fall 2009

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MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA/CORBIS money I HEALTH CARE ENDRA LUCERO CLAESON can hardly hug her three kids anymore. She’s suffering from an incurable autoimmune dis- ease that makes those hugs excruciat- ingly painful. “I kill myself to pick them up,” she told the Albuquerque Journal, “[But] I can’t turn them down if they want me to hold them.” Lucero Claeson, just 30, is covered by health insurance but it won’t pay for an expensive medicine that could save her life. Even though the drug has appeared to provide relief from in- tense pain for her and many others, Presbyterian Health Plan stopped pay- ing for her treatments because no stud- ies exist to prove their effectiveness. At least Lucero Claeson still has health insurance—with all its prob- lems that need fixing—against the in- evitable time she’ll depend on it for hospitalization; millions of other women in the U.S. can’t say the same. According to government statistics on- line at HealthReform.gov, less than half of U.S. women have the option of health benefits from their own em- ployer. Of those ineligible, nearly 40 percent will remain uninsured. Then there’s cost. Because women on average don’t earn as much as men, they have fewer dollars available to pay for private insurance poli- cies—a particularly hard truth for single women who can’t piggyback on their partners’ policies. Result? Sin- gle women are twice as likely to be The anti-health-reform rally on the National Mall in September was part of a summer of demonstrations supported by Big Health. www.msmagazine.com FALL 2009 | 47 Astroturf War K BY MARTHA BURK Who’s really behind the uproar against health-care reform? uninsured as those who are married. Even when women can afford an individual policy, many live in states where they’re punished on their pre- miums simply for being women, ac- cording to a report by the National Women’s Law Center. For example, one Missouri plan charges a 40-year- old woman nearly two and one-half times what it charges a 40-year-old man. And the vast majority of indi- vidual policies don’t offer maternity benefits, at any price. It’s not just women under 50 who are victims of insurance company roulette, either. Nearly a third of women ages 50 to 64 are in house- holds spending more than 10 per- cent of their income on health care, says HealthReform.gov, while only a quarter of men in that age group are in households that pay out such a high percentage. With these miserable statistics, one would think women would be carrying pitchforks and torches in favor of change in the health-care insurance system. And, in fact, health-care re- formers have targeted women, know- ing women are the major health-care decision-makers for their families. Michelle Obama delivered a major ad- dress on women and health care in September, among other efforts to rouse women’s support. But the anti- reform movement has targeted women as well, claiming in one com- mercial that reform would significant- ly lower a woman’s chance of surviving breast cancer. After a sizzling summer of demonstrations and packed town hall meetings, the efforts of the anti- reformers reached a crescendo when thousands of people turned up for a

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