GOP touts preventive care it opposed

One of many important reforms in the health care reform bill is better access to preventive and wellness care for all Americans to help prevent diseases or detect them in earlier stages.

As survivors of breast and ovarian cancer, respectively, we know how crucial this preventive care can be: It saved our lives.


But if Republicans have their way, tens of millions of Americans are likely to keep paying for preventive care or not receive it at all because they cannot afford the co-pays.

Under the Affordable Care Act, recommended preventive care — including cancer screenings, health checkups, flu shots, mammograms and immunizations — requires no co-pay for Americans with new insurance plans.

The Obama administration recently announced rules that will begin implementing this important provision, paving the way for 41 million Americans and counting to take advantage of it starting in September.

We know for a fact that making preventive care more available, with no out-of-pocket cost, is likely to reduce the number of preventable deaths in America.

To take one example, women whose ovarian cancer is detected at an early stage are more than three times as likely to survive as those whose cancer is detected later. Sadly, more than 60 percent of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer between 1999 and 2006 fell into the latter category.

Preventive care is fiscally responsible. Paying for regular mammograms is a lot cheaper and a lot more beneficial, in terms of money and quality of life, than paying for and undergoing surgery, radiation, chemotherapy or hormonal therapy. In short, preventive care goes a long way toward reducing surging health care costs for American families.

Even Republicans who voted against the health care reform law and went out of their way to prevent its passage have now lauded these reforms. Recently, on the Senate floor, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) actually took credit for the preventive care provision. “One of the things we did in the health care legislation,” Kyl said, “was to provide a lot of different incentives for preventive care.”

Coming from the same gentleman who, when the bill was being debated, memorably derided coverage of maternity care as useless, this is high praise indeed.

This is not the first time Republicans have taken credit for health care provisions that they had tried to derail. After the act passed, and every Republican attempt to gut the bill had failed, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took credit for provisions that banned the practice of rescissions — dropping people’s health coverage when they get sick — and allowed young adults to continue being covered by their parents’ plans until age 26.

To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, success has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan. So we understand why Republicans now like to laud health care reform — particularly when one considers that, after a decade of congressional control with eight years holding the White House as well, they had failed to do anything about the issue.

Now that we have acted on behalf of the American people to reform the health insurance system, we cannot afford to allow Republicans to take the nation backward. Their proposed repeal of these common-sense reforms would explode the budget, put insurance companies back in charge of rationing care and deny millions of Americans free preventive care that, in the long run, saves money and — as we can attest — saves lives.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) serves on the House Appropriations Committee. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) is co-chairwoman of the House Steering and Policy Committee and chairwoman of the House Appropriations Agriculture Subcommittee.