Written by Lisa Codispoti, National Women's Law Center, Senior Counsel

This morning ten women members of Congress held a news conference on "how the Democrats' health care legisaltion [sic] will hurt women and affect their day-to-day lives."

The participants were Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA.); Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN); Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL); Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN); Rep. Mary Fallin (R-OK); Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC); Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX); Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-KS); Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY); Rep. Candice Miller, (R-MI); Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL); and Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH).

While NWLC wasn’t invited to attend the press conference, I was interested to get my hands on some of their press statements – after all, NWLC is all about women getting the health care they need. From our perspective, the status quo is untenable: overall, 18 percent of women are uninsured. As we’ve pointed out on this blog many times before, even women who are lucky enough to have health insurance are still more likely than men to have health coverage that has too many gaps, from large deductibles and co-pays to life-time limits, and the exclusion of needed services (like maternity, for example) altogether. Women are also more likely than men to face challenges paying for their medical bills – making them more likely to skip necessary medical care. And then there’s gender rating – the insurance industry practice of charging women more than men for the exact same coverage.

Yet the challenges women deal with every day in our current health care system was most decidedly not the focus of the press conference this morning – at least as evidenced by the press release issued by Rep. Rodgers (R-Wash), available here.

I’ll give the Congresswomen credit where it’s due: we need more of our elected leaders to bring a women’s lens to the health care reform debate. But what they apparently didn’t talk about is more important than what they did talk about. They didn’t talk about how the current system is failing women, and that the status quo is not an option. And it certainly doesn’t seem that they discussed any real solutions to the challenges that women face with our current health system.

Of course, if they had talked about how the current system fails women and proposed solutions to meet those challenges, then they would have had to admit that HR3200 would actually help- not hurt- women. As Marcia Greenberger, our Co-President, has said HR 3200 “addresses many of the obstacles women face in our current health care system, such as making health care more affordable and ensuring that women have access to the comprehensive health benefits they need.”

Women don’t just need better health care, they want it – now. According to a poll conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates before the 2008 Presidential election, 84 percent of women said that it was extremely or very important for Congress and the new Administration to guarantee access to quality, affordable, comprehensive health care.

What hurts women is our current health care system. What hurts women is Members of Congress who knock health reform legislation under the guise of caring about women’s health. Because women know: when it comes to health care, the status quo is not an option.

Cross-posted from NWLC's blog.