Health Care Reform
Health Care Reform
Every US resident should have access to affordable, quality health care, including birth control and the privacy to make reproductive choices.
Why It Matters
The US health care system should provide a basic level of quality health care at an affordable cost to all US residents. Basic care includes disease prevention, primary care (including prenatal and reproductive health), acute long-term care, mental health care, as well as health promotion and education. Health care policy goals should include the equitable distribution of services and delivery of care, advancement of medical research and technology, and a reasonable total national expenditure level.
What We're Doing
Over the past 20 years, we have lobbied for health care policy solutions, including the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to control costs and ensure a basic level of care for all. Throughout the health care debates of the past few decades, Leagues worked to provide millions of Americans across the country with objective information about the health care system and its significant reforms. This included organizing community education projects, holding public forums and debates, creating and distributing resource materials, and engaging leading policymakers and analysts.
LWV is mobilizing partners with Planned Parenthood Action Fund in the Bans Off Our Bodies campaign for reproductive justice.
In June 2022, the US Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey and ending the federal constitutional right to abortion. As the Supreme Court no longer recognizes the right to abortion as protected by the US Constitution, this ruling makes state constitutional amendments even more significant, leaving the right to abortion up to federal or state laws.
This piece was originally published in VTDigger.
This commentary is by Dottye Ricks of Barre Town, a Reproductive Liberty Amendment liaison for the League of Women Voters, of which she’s been a member for more than 30 years. She is a retired public school and university teacher, an elder in the First Presbyterian Church of Barre and a longtime member of the gleaning service group Community Harvest of Central Vermont.
LWVUS filed an amicus brief in support of plaintiffs in Hecox v. Little, which challenges Idaho’s law that targets transgender, nonbinary, and intersex students with the nation’s harshest requirements for participation in women’s sports.
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