The Women's Health Program
Our approaches include advocacy, communications, consumer education, grassroots organizing, policy analysis, research and technical assistance. While our focus is on women’s health, we recognize that access to needed health care can be affected not only by an individual’s gender, but also by sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, immigration status, income, age and disability. We work to lift up the voices of women who are rarely represented in health policy discussions, such as young women, women of color, immigrant women, older women, low-income women, lesbians, transgender women and men, and gender nonconforming people.
Our current work is focused in three specific areas:
- Defending and building on the policy gains for women’s health that the Affordable Care Act has made possible. We do this through Raising Women’s Voices for the Health Care We Need, a national initiative we guide in partnership with the National Women’s Health Network and the Black Women’s Health Imperative. Raising Women’s Voices provides funding support and technical assistance to 30 regional coordinators around the country who work to influence federal and state policies on women’s health.
- Helping women and families learn how to enroll in and effectively use health insurance to get the care they need without unexpected costs. Because women are often the arrangers of health care for their entire families, we have created health insurance literacy materials that make complicated insurance concepts understandable. We lead Raising Women’s Voices’ literacy campaign, My Health, My Voice, which has educated thousands of newly-insured women about how to use their coverage to navigate a complex health system.
- Protecting access to women’s and LGBTQ-inclusive health services, especially reproductive health care and gender-affirming care, as hospitals merge and health systems consolidate. Across the nation, community hospitals are merging with each other and joining large health systems. Often, this consolidation leads to hospital closings or downsizing, such as elimination of maternity care or the discontinuation of specific services, including contraceptive counseling, tubal ligations, abortion services or gender-affirming care. We advocate for state oversight of hospital consolidation that is more transparent, better engages affected consumers and protects community access to care. We publish research, propose policy improvements and provide technical assistance to community-based advocates facing proposed mergers.