As a mother, a social worker, and an elected official who has always prided herself on supporting women, the issue of healthcare affordability affects me deeply.
I have been thinking about the women and mothers who take care of everyone but themselves, especially when it comes to healthcare. Mothers delaying their doctor’s appointments so they can afford groceries that week, the daughters who are discouraged from seeking care due to cost, and the working women doing all they can to keep their family afloat as their health slips lower and lower on the priority list.
Health care affordability is most definitely a women’s issue and it’s time we did something about it.
The Fair Pricing Act (S705/A2140) is a straightforward policy with a high impact: it lowers the cost for routine services that many women need, but too often, delay because of cost.
We are facing a healthcare affordability crisis across the country. A recent Gallup poll found that one-third of Americans cut back on other expenses to afford healthcare, including skipping meals, cutting back on utilities, and even postponing life events in the hopes that they might be able to afford the care they need.
Women’s health and maternal healthcare are not only chronically underfunded and misunderstood areas of care, but factors such as cost, time, and accessibility have lead to women having higher rates of forgoing or delaying care than men. Women are 32% more likely than men to skip care due to cost. Even excluding maternal healthcare, women spend 18% more on health care than men. This is not just a statistic, it is the reality for far too many women.
In recent decades, wealthy hospital systems across New York have used their market power to purchase smaller doctor’s offices, and then charge more than the independent office. The same, routine care, such as an ultrasound, a flu shot, or a colonoscopy can cost an average of four-times more, because a wealthy hospital system now owns the building.
We’ve seen this pattern of consolidation lead to higher prices too many times before—in housing, in the auto industry, and in our grocery stores. We can’t allow this trend to impact our access to healthcare, we can’t allow profits to be the priority.
The Fair Pricing Act ensures that routine care stays at a routine cost, capping prices for a specific set of outpatient services that do not require an overnight stay at 150% of Medicare’s price for that service. This means that Hospital Outpatient Departments and independent physicians must charge the same, lower price. If the service doesn’t require hospital resources, why should it come with a hospital-sized bill?
These services are not core revenue generators for wealthy hospital systems, but they can be the difference between catching a condition early or an illness progressing to a later stage, requiring more intense treatment. These should not be optional services that depend on a patient’s ability to afford them, but rather they are routine services that can save lives.
Breast ultrasounds are regularly used to determine if abnormalities found during mammograms could be cancerous. The average service price for a breast ultrasound in a Hospital Outpatient Department (HOPD) is $500, but under the Fair Pricing Act the average price would be $177.
The Fair Pricing Act lowers prices for pap smears, biopsies, colonoscopies and more. All are crucial for early detection of life-threatening illnesses, including breast cancer, cervical cancer, and colon cancer.
Certain maternal and gynecological health services are included as well. A fetal non stress test, a standard procedure to monitor high risk pregnancies, costs an average of $557 in an HOPD, as opposed to $78 under the Fair Pricing Act. That’s another $479 in savings, a drop in the bucket for wealthy systems paying their CEOs millions of dollars.
But for a working mom, that $400+ can add a cushion for the unexpected expenses that inevitably come with raising a family. Expecting mothers should not have to deliberate on whether they can afford necessary care, and with the Fair Pricing Act, they won’t have to.
Unaffordable health care is inaccessible healthcare, plain and simple. To encourage patients to seek these important, but often overlooked tests, biopsies, and other forms of routine care, we must bring the cost down.
We have a duty to all New Yorkers to address the affordability crisis currently facing our state — the Fair Pricing Act can help.
As the Assembly sponsor of The Fair Pricing Act and as someone who believes that healthcare affordability is a major concern for all women, I hope my colleagues in the legislature will join together to pass this bill and make healthcare more affordable and accessible for women and all New Yorkers.
