New Office of Women's Health in House Health Care Bill

Note: This post is part of the National Women’s Day of Action for Health Care Reform. Learn more at A Woman Is Not A Pre-Existing Condition

Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to embrace my masochistic tendencies and try to tackle the (Democratic) House health care bill yesterday. I was searching for information on new regulations that will prohibit insurance companies from using gender ratings to discriminate against women when I came across Sec. 2588 on pg. 1609.

What is Sec. 2588? I’m so glad you asked. Sec. 2588 (under Division C – Public Health and Workforce Development > Title V – Other Provisions > Subtitle E – Miscellaneous)  will establish an Office of Women’s Health (OWH) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Yes, you read that right. There will be an entire division of the federal government devoted to women’s health.

Among other things, OWH will establish short & long-term goals for HHS and other agencies for women’s health: disease prevention, health promotion, service delivery, research, and public and health care professional education. OWH will be headed up by a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, which is an appointed position. (Sec. 229, pg. 1609)

The Deputy Assistant Secretary, who I’ll just refer to as the Secretary to make my life a lot simpler, will establish and chair the  HHS Coordinating Committee on Women’s Health. It will be composed of senior-level representatives from each of the federal agencies. Although the bill doesn’t explicitly lay out the functions of the Coordinating Committee, I assume it will be a lot like the White House on Women and Girls, only for health issues.

OWH will coordinate efforts to promote women’s health initiatives in private sector. Additionally, it will set up a National Women’s Health Information Center. This office will serve as a clearinghouse for women’s health information to the public and private sector.

There will also be an Office of Women’s Health established at the Center for Disease Control (CDC). This office will monitor will monitor women’s health initiatives within the CDC and establish short and long-term goals for the CDC relating to women’s health. In other words, this mini-OWH will be in charge of making sure the CDC is researching women’s health – what a concept! (Sec. 310A, pg. 1614)

There will also be an Office of Women’s Health and Gender-Based Research within HHS. This office will keep tabs on the current status of research, identify areas of need for research on women’s health and make short and long term goals for research on women’s health.

There will be an Office of Women’s Health within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Again, what a concept. This office will monitor and report on women’s participation and outcomes in FDA clinical trials. It will establish short and long term goals for “adequate inclusion of women and analysis of data by sex in Administration protocols and policies”. In regular person talk, that means they’ll actually have to make sure to include women in their studies and reports. It will provide information to women and health care providers on differences between men and women in FDA studies and trials. Unfortunately, this mini-OWH at the FDA will not have any new regulatory authority. I’m not sure what the possible ramifications are but this seems bothersome. (Sec. 911)

All in all, I am extremely impressed with this new Office of Women’s Health. It appears that it will coordinate women’s health services across all the federal agencies and work to improve women’s health by conducting research, disseminating data to consumers and institutions, promoting prevention and wellness and more. Of course, this will be a brand-new bureaucracy so it will never work perfectly. Still, what excites me the most is the research OWH and its affiliates will conduct. For so long, medical research has been done on men and the results were assumed to be the same for women. This would be long overdue.

There is one very large BUT here. The provision to create an Office of Women’s Health is only in the Democratic House bill. It is not in the Senate bill or the Republican House bill. The House is tentatively set to vote on this bill as early as Saturday. I’m not sure if Sen. Reid is allowing amendments to the Senate bill anymore but if he is, we need to urge our senators to include a similar provision. That way, it will have a better chance of being in the conference bill.

Read the House bill here. The Office of Women’s Health provision starts on p. 1609, Sec. 2588. Make your life simple and use the search function to find it. Oh, and if you notice I read or summarized the bill incorrectly, please let me know: danine@danine.net. Thanks!