“I will never stop fighting for health care you can count on – at any age.“ -- Senator Barbara A. Mikulski
Saving and strengthening Medicare
- Closing the prescription drug donut hole
- Ensuring seniors won’t have to pay more for recommended preventative care
- Incentivizing higher quality value care, not volume care<
- Finding solutions to extend Medicare’s solvency, so it doesn’t go broke in 2017
Ending punitive practices of insurance companies
- Making sure insurance companies can’t deny coverage to anyone because of pre-existing conditions
- Making sure your coverage can’t be canceled because of an unexpected health condition or mistake on your application
- Requiring insurers to publicly disclose and justify outrageous premium increases
- Requiring insurers to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on direct health care services
- Strengthening consumer protections to eliminate lifetime and annual caps
- Requiring preventative care with no co-pay and no deductibles
- Allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plan until age 26
Championing health care quality, prevention and integrative health to save lives and save money
- Using best practices to reduce medical errors
- Encouraging discharge planning to reduce hospital readmissions
- Simplifying administrative procedures and facilitating enrollment into health and human services programs to save billions per year and reduce the hassle factor of health practitioners
- Coordinating care and creating community health teams to save money and reduce chronic conditions
Fighting for universal access to health care
- Expanding Medicaid to an additional 16 million Americans
- Expanding coverage to 32 million Americans who were uninsured
- Establishing health exchanges that will make health insurance more affordable and easier to purchase for small business and individuals
- Providing tax credits to small businesses to make health care more affordable for them
- Providing subsidies to employers who provide health insurance to early retirees not yet eligible for Medicare
A lifetime commitment to women’s health
- Helped create the National Institutes of Health Office of Women’s Health to study women’s needs and health issues
- Created the Mammogram Quality Standards Act and continues to fight for strong standards and yearly facility inspections
- Ending gender discrimination by insurance companies, so being a woman is not considered a pre-existing condition
- Requiring screening and preventative care -- including annual mammograms for women over 40 -- for no co-pay and no-deductible
- Fighting to make maternity services part of essential benefits package
- Allowing women to see their OB/GYN without a referral
How Health Reform Helps:
Maryland
Seniors
Small Businesses
Women