The Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies announced today, in conjunction with the Affordable Care Act, new rules that would require private health insurers to provide preventive care services for free, with no co-pays, co-insurance or deductibles. The rule takes effect September 23 of this year. Services like blood pressure, diabetes [...]

The first amendment introduced on the floor of the Senate comes from Sen. Barbara Mikulski, seeking to add a provision included in the HELP Committee version of the bill. This measure would mandate coverage – for free – for various women’s preventive health procedures and screenings. This is a direct response to the controversy surrounding [...]

Days after a controversial recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force on breast cancer screening, a separate organization has recommended less screenings for cervical cancer. Anyone seeing eerie parallels or ready to scream about “rationing” needs to read a bit more closely: New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first [...]

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released a statement of thinly veiled criticism toward those new guidelines from the US Preventive Services Task Force on breast cancer screening: “There is no question that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommendations have caused a great deal of confusion and worry among women and their families [...]

It was inevitable that the news of the US Preventive Services Task Force changing their guidelines on mammography would cause a political uproar. In a year where Congress is not trying to do comprehensive health care reform, the findings would be controversial. In this year, especially because of the role of the USPSTF in at [...]

The US Preventive Services Task Force, which previously recommended that women get screened for breast cancer at age 40, have changed their recommendation: The new recommendations, which do not apply to a small group of women with unusual risk factors for breast cancer, reverse longstanding guidelines and are aimed at reducing harm from overtreatment, the [...]

The inclusion of the Stupak amendment in the House health care bill certainly represented a setback for women’s health. But a provocative article in The Nation suggested that other portions of the bill shortchanged women by not requiring certain basic preventive services for women, or enabling providers to charge extra for them. Sharon Lerner argues [...]