Women's Health

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I am honored to rise today after my distinguished colleagues have spoken on this issue so powerfully and eloquently, but I do so reluctantly because I rise in the face of a continuing assault on women's health care in this country--an assault on women's health care that is unworthy of our political system because these health care decisions involving women should be made by them. They are a matter of their conscience and their choice. Politics has no place in health care decisions.

This assault is waged by a group on the radical right. It is an ideologically based attack on personal health care decisions of women and their families, and they are wasting taxpayer dollars doing it. This ideologically based stand on women's health care over these years is nothing less than unconscionable and unbelievable.

I have only been in this body for a short time, but one of the first votes I cast was on H.R. 1, which wasn't about growing jobs or strengthening our economy, it was known best for completely eliminating the funding for responsible family planning programs. The fact is family planning can prevent unintended high-risk pregnancies, reduce abortion rates--reduce abortion rates--and they are cost-effective. They provide $4 of return for every $1 that is spent on family planning, invested in those programs. But there are some on the radical right who would rather have the people of our Nation pay $11 billion a year in unplanned pregnancies rather than receive a nearly threefold return on investment for family planning services.

This debate is about more than dollars and cents, and it is about more than cost. It is about protecting the right of every woman to receive good-quality preventive care and equal access to preventive health care benefits from the provider they trust. And these decisions should be made between the provider a woman trusts and herself.

In 2010, Congress took a great step forward, as my colleague Senator Mikulski has described so powerfully. A decision was made to require health care plans to cover a core packet of preventive health services, moving our country dramatically and historically toward a trend of overall lifetime health.

The Institute of Medicine--an unbiased scientific organization--was tasked with evaluating the most important preventive services to include in the best health outcomes for women, seeking those best health outcomes for every woman in America. This scientific organization named birth control as one of those core benefits--birth control. Let's be very clear. We are talking about birth control--the pill that 99 percent of women use as part of their daily preventive health care. At some point in their lives, 99 percent of women use it.

That very same benefit--coverage for it--is guaranteed by 28 States around the Nation. They already require health care plans to cover it. And more than half of the women of our Nation live in those States. Now the radical right would seek to take away that guarantee--that coverage, that basic health care outcome. They would take away that right--repeal it, restrict it, remove it as an option for women. That is unacceptable.

Women spend an average of $500 per year for birth control--a cost men will never have to incur. That is why the Institute of Medicine recommended that birth control be included as part of the package of preventive services without copays--because costs should not be a barrier to those 99 percent of women in the United States who use birth control. Yet the radical right has decided that the politics of taking birth control away from women is more important, and they have used every tool in their arsenal--creating misunderstandings--to try to take this right away from women, including misrepresenting what the administration has decided to do. One of these mistruths they are spreading is that churches will be required to offer birth control. Not so. Another is that institutions affiliated with churches will be required to provide those services. Not true. What any institution is required to cover is, in fact, the coverage, not necessarily provide the service, and that is a key distinction.

The majority of Americans agree that employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost. The majority of Americans believe that is true. Nearly two-thirds of young Americans of childbearing age agree that employer health care coverage should include birth control at no cost.

In short, this decision should be a matter of conscience, a matter of choice for individual women. Politicians should not be permitted to exploit it, as some are doing now. I stand for women making choices about their own health care, and I stand against politicians telling them what they should do. This issue before this body and this Nation is one of the critical issues of this time, and politics has no place in these health care decisions.

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