Planned Parenthood® Action Center

Obama v. McCain

Whose Health Care Plan Will Actually Protect Women's Health?

Planned Parenthood believes all women and men in America should have access to high-quality, affordable, and confidential health care from a provider they know and trust. But we have far to go to meet that goal.  The United States spends more than $2 trillion on health care every year, yet

• more than 70 million Americans do not have enough insurance coverage to meet their health care needs
• more than 45.7 million Americans are uninsured
• an additional 25 million are underinsured

Planned Parenthood believes we can build a better health care system, one that guarantees

• affordable and high-quality health care, including comprehensive reproductive health care, for all
• direct access to trusted reproductive health care providers of choice
• a sufficient supply of adequately compensated providers
• investment in prevention as a top health care priority
• real efforts to reduce health care disparities among people of various socioeconomic levels

Both presidential candidates have proposed plans to make health care more affordable and more accessible for Americans, but only one of those plans will actually do that.

Sen. Barack Obama's Health Plan	Sen. John McCain's Health Plan
would improve the health of women and their families:	would have especially devastating effects on women:
offers new coverage options to more than 17 million uninsured women and extends coverage to more than eight million uninsured children and adolescents in the United States	places more than 30 million women with chronic illnesses at risk of losing their employer-sponsored health insurance
allows individuals and small businesses to access health plans like those enjoyed by federal employees and members of Congress	steers people into an unregulated national market, where they would face exclusions for pre-existing conditions and could be denied coverage
increases employer responsibility to insure the four out of five uninsured individuals currently living in households with at least one working adult	undoes state protections for consumers, including guarantees for critical preventive services
prohibits insurance plans from turning away individuals because of illness or pre-existing conditions	increases health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, which could reduce access to needed care
requires strategies to address health disparities among socioeconomic groups and delivers better and culturally appropriate health care	offers quality health care to those who are healthy and wealthy, while everyone else would pay more for less

For more details, see the full analysis, or read a critique of McCain's health plan.