To put that number in perspective, the 200% federal poverty level for a family of 2 is only $29,420. Enough to put a roof over your head and buy food? Possibly. Enough to pay for a private health insurance plan if your job does not include insurance benefits? Not likely. Some of these women qualify for Medicaid; but many private doctors have limits on the number of Medicaid patients they will see, and some will not accept Medicaid at all. A third of these women have no insurance at all; no Medicaid, no private insurance, no options aside from paying cash for health services. Cash-paying patients do not have the benefit of paying the discounted fees for services that insurance companies pay. Most doctors will not work with these patients or offer payment plans. The health department can offer help to uninsured people with no ability to pay, but various health departments do various GYN procedures, and all have limited family planning hours and numbers of people they can see. The free clinics in the area do not generally deal with OB/GYN issues, and many are not even able to meet the growing need for health care in Hampton Roads. Many of our most vulnerable citizens are suffering.
Women with emergencies can seek care at emergency rooms, and cannot be turned away regardless of ability to pay. However, there are many health issues that women deal with that are non-emergent, but greatly affect their quality of life. In terms of GYN issues we see, they can include incontinence, excessive bleeding, pelvic pain, ovarian cysts, endometriosis and much more. These issues are extremely common, yet often go untreated when uninsured women do not have the means to pay cash to have them corrected.
 To give you a sense of some other health outcomes in Virginia:
• STD rates for Norfolk, Portsmouth and Newport News are 2.5 times higher than the state rate
• Teen pregnancy rates in Norfolk and Portsmouth are 2 times higher than the state rate
• Infant death rates in Norfolk and Portsmouth are almost twice the state rate
• The Portsmouth and Norfolk health districts rank #1 and #2 in the state in the death rate for breast cancer
• The Norfolk health district ranks third in the state in incidence of cervical cancer
• In 2008, Virginia’s preterm birth rate was 11.3 percent, giving us a “D” rating from the March of Dimes
• Virginia ranks in the bottom half of the country for infant mortality rates
• Hampton Roads had the second-highest rate of chlamydia cases among U.S. metropolitan areas and third-highest rate of gonorrhea cases, according to a 2010 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Eastern Virginia has the highest percentage of people living with HIV/AIDS in the state.
• The number of people diagnosed with syphilis in Virginia has increased every year since 2005.
Planned Parenthood works diligently every day to try and reverse some of these dismal health outcomes, through affordable reproductive health and family planning services, as well as comprehensive sex education. We have two health centers that are large enough to accommodate the growing need for services in our community, located in Virginia Beach and Hampton. We do not receive any state or federal funding and therefore cannot offer free services; however, all of our fees are steeply discounted, and a majority of our patients pay out of pocket. We offer a
wide range of services, from annual exams, breast and cervical cancer screenings, problem visits, all forms of birth control, emergency contraception, pregnancy testing and all-options counseling, prenatal care, Essure (a permanent sterilization procedure for women), testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, testing for HIV and the HPV vaccine.
Too many women are going without much-needed health services, dealing with issues that could be easily corrected if health care was accessible and affordable. Planned Parenthood hopes to expand that access and the range of GYN procedures available to low-income women who are currently going without.
To learn more about our quest or how you can help, contact us at 499-PLAN or e-mail us at marketing@ppsev.org!
To learn more about Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Virginia, visit www.ppsev.org or call us at 499-PLAN (7536).
Erin Zabel is the director of marketing and public relations for PPSEV. She can be reached at 309-4834 or marketing@ppsev.org. |
