Dear Gentlemen of the Congress: 

Excuse us, but have you forgotten about the women in your life? 

We are waiting for you to deliver quality, affordable health care for all -- as soon as possible, given the economic trials our families are enduring. Instead, some of you are wasting valuable time and taxpayer dollars proposing amendments that would deny health care to women, gays and lesbians, people with HIV and anybody else conservatives don't like! 

Imagine our dismay to see the proposed amendments submitted to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee this week by Republican Senators Michael Enzi, Orin Hatch and Tom Coburn: 

• Coverage for abortion would be banned;
• Health providers and insurers would be protected against "discrimination" for refusing to provide health care requested by their patients including abortions, emergency contraception, aid-in-dying (such as in Oregon, Washington and Montana, where this is legal) or really just about any health service they find objectionable;
• Federally-qualified health centers could not provide abortions and still get government grants;
• Any independent medical board appointed to determine the benefits that would be included in national health reform coverage would have to include "professional ethicists...with specialty in rights of the life of the unborn."

Apparently, you conservative Republicans have forgotten the advice GOP consultant Frank Luntz gave you just two months ago about how to talk about health reform: "What Americans are looking for in health reform is more access to treatments and more doctors...with less interference from insurance companies and Washington politicians and special interests." That means we don't want any more interference in our health care from you, or any of the right-wing groups urging you to use health reform to restore the rejected Bush "moral values" agenda.  

Now, let's turn to you Democrats who are supposedly running Congress. You are spending far too much time trying to win over colleagues who are never going to vote for health reform, no matter if you offer them abortion exclusions or new provider "conscience" laws or other provisions that would hobble health reform. You need to get over your worries that if you support inclusion of a strong public plan in health reform, somebody is going to call you a socialist.  

Don't forget that women are among the strongest supporters of moving quickly on health reform this year. Why? Women are grassroots experts on what is broken in the current health system. 

Insurance plans try to squirm out of covering us when we are having babies by declaring our pregnancies to be "pre-existing conditions." In a lot of states, insurance companies charge us more than men for health coverage, largely because of the costs of having children. They call this "gender rating." We call it discrimination.  

If we're not ready to have children, we're also out of luck. Some insurers don't cover contraception. And low-income women have no coverage for abortions in the federal Medicaid program that you're talking about expanding. It's not included in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, either, so let's not make that a model for health reform. 

If we get a divorce, we can lose our health coverage if it's through our spouse's policy from work. We can also lose dependent coverage if our husband dies, or if he becomes eligible for Medicare. Some of us, however, aren't even eligible for dependent coverage in a homophobic system that does not recognize our relationships. 

Women are the majority of the low-wage health care aides who often don't have health insurance coverage ourselves. We strain our backs lifting patients, and then have no coverage for the treatment we need.  

We take everybody to the doctor - our kids, our spouses, our elderly parents, even our neighbors, when they need help. We sit for hours in those dismal waiting rooms with plastic chairs. We dig deep in our pocketbooks for co-pays. When somebody is sick, we've often the ones who stay home to provide care, using up our sick time.  

So, what do women want? Call your mother - or sister, daughter or spouse! Meanwhile, here's the list we've been compiling at Raising Women's voices for the Health Care We Need:

1. Keep politics, politicians and ideology out of the decisions about which benefits should be included.  This is health care, people! Your moral values don't belong there.
2. Health coverage should start at birth and end at death, with no interruptions. We shouldn't lose it when we change jobs, get divorced or move from one state to another.
3. Make it affordable. Use a sliding scale. Offer subsidies for those who can't pay very much.
4. Make it fair. Don't charge women more than men. Don't let insurance companies refuse to cover people because they have diabetes, cancer, asthma or any other "pre-existing condition."
5. Make it simple. Tell insurance companies to stop tricking us into buying policies that don't cover the care we need. There should be no hidden clauses or surprises.
6. Make it better.  Give us the high quality care that this country is capable of delivering, instead of extra tests and unneeded services that feed the bottom-line for drug companies or for-profit hospitals and medical systems at our expense.  And fix the system so that poor people, people of color, people with disabilities and LGBT people get high quality care too.
7. Cover everybody! Stop arguing about whether we should cover undocumented immigrants or force legal immigrants to wait five years to be eligible. If they are living here as our neighbors, we want them to be healthy. Fixing the immigration system is a separate issue.
8. This should be a wellness system, not a sickness system. Sure, we want to have medical care when we get sick, but better preventive care and stronger public health measures in our own communities can help us stay healthy.

Our message to you is this: Get health reform done!  We know it's not easy, but women have been doing the hard work of keeping you and the rest of your families healthy under very tough circumstances for a long time.  Now it's your turn!