Honoring Mothers With Better Benefits

“For men they created retirement plans, medical benefits, profit sharing and gold watches. “For women, they created Mother’s Day.”

That is the message--illustrated with insurance policies and stock certificates for the men and a box of chocolates for the women--in a new ad created by Young & Rubicam/San Francisco for the Older Women’s League.

The league will be sending Mother’s Day cards later this week to all members of Congress in conjunction with release of its new “gray paper” titled “Health Care Financing and Midlife Women: A Sick System.” The cards, designed like greeting cards with a picture of a mother on the cover, suggest that legislators can honor their mothers by voting for laws that provide for financing for adequate health care and that recognize the special health needs of women.

The United States, the report points out, is the only industrialized nation besides South Africa that does not provide a national health plan for its citizens. The aims of the league, a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy organization, are not only a government-funded national health plan, but also to fill the gaps in private insurance coverage, some of which results from sex discrimination.

In the matter of health care, the largest group of needy Americans are older women. Women make up 60% of the aging population, and outnumber men 2-to-1 in the group over age 75. Seventy percent of the residents of nursing homes are women over 65.

Under the present system, nursing home care is a financial disaster that hits women hardest because there are more of them and they are poorer than men. “Most people are under the false impression that Medicare covers long-term care,” the league said, and more than 85% of Americans are uninsured or underinsured for this care.

The league found that the average cost for a year in a nursing home is $22,000. The average income of a woman over 65 is $6,313. Two out of three people who live alone would become impoverished after 13 weeks if they needed to be in a nursing home, and about that number of people who do not live alone would exhaust their resources within a year. Their non-institutionalized spouses and dependents would be impoverished as well before funding from Medicaid (state funds for health care for the poor) could step in.

Out of many possibilities, the league picked four health care requests to put in its Mother’s Day card to Congress. One of these was income security for spouses of nursing home patients.

The other three demands on behalf of women were:

--Protection against the catastrophic costs of chronic health problems. (There is greater prevalence among women than men of long-term chronic diseases, such as arthritis, diabetes, visual impairment, osteoporosis and, among black women, hypertension, the report said.)

--An end to cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. (Medicaid is no safety net, the report said. “In most states, unless she has minor children, is blind, disabled or over 65, she will be ineligible to receive Medicaid, even if her income and assets are zero.”

--Action on the special health needs of women of all ages. Along with the obvious health concerns unique to women such as pregnancy, childbirth and breast and cervical cancer, the league identified some lesser-known areas of need. It found, for example, that women of any age are frequently disqualified for private insurance coverage because of conditions such as benign breast lumps or cervical lesions, even though these are not regarded as predictors of future problems.

About 5 million women between the ages of 40 and 65--vulnerable ages for illness--have no health insurance coverage, the report said. One large area of discrepancy between women and men is in employment coverage, described as “the Cadillac” of health insurance by the league. Group employee plans generally cost about half the amount of an individual policy--including both the employer’s and employee’s share of the premium--and provides the most benefits. Another advantage is that employees are covered under the plan without exclusion and regardless of condition or medical history. Eighty-five percent of all private health insurance coverage in the United States is through employment group plans, and, in the case of the most costly health care expenditure, hospitalization, most plans pay 80%.

“This dramatically illustrates the fact that access to health care in this country is through Medicare, Medicaid or a tie to the paid labor force,” the report said. However, for women, the tie to the labor force is not as advantageous as for men.

About a quarter of the women in the labor force are part-time workers, and only about half the companies that offer benefits like health insurance to their full-time staffs offer them to part-timers. Women who work full time are far more likely than men to work in non-unionized and service sectors, the least likely employers to offer benefits. As a result, many single women receive no coverage through work, and many working wives as well as homemakers rely on their husbands’ employment for health insurance. That dependence has been disastrous for women who were widowed or divorced in later life when it is more difficult and expensive to obtain individual coverage.

One of the Older Women’s League’s successes was its effort on federal legislation, passed last year, that enables former dependents to continue (paying the premium themselves) health coverage under their former spouse’s employment policy for up to three years.

All of these issues and others will be discussed at a “Mother’s Day Celebration,” open to the public, from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Women’s Center at the National Council of Jewish Women’s Council House, 543 N. Fairfax Ave. Co-sponsors include the Gray Panthers, Congress of California Seniors, Los Angeles County and City Area Agencies on Aging, the American Assn. of Retired Persons, National Caucus Center for Black Aged and National Assn. of Retired Federal Employees. Donation is $3.