Survey Shows Women 'Value' Existing Health Insurance Plans, Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece Says

November 4, 2009 — Although women are viewed as a "key constituency of Democrats, particularly on issues like health care," current health care reform proposals "not only concern women, they may actually drive women away from the party," claims Heather Richardson Higgins, chair of the Independent Women's Forum, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. A recent IWF survey aimed to "better understand women's health care concerns," Higgins writes. She adds, "Women, it turns out, see health care reform as being for someone other than themselves."

Of the 800 registered voters included in the survey, 40% self-identified as Democrats, 32% as Republicans and 22% as independents, with the rest not offering a party affiliation. Eighty-one percent of the respondents voted in the 2008 election and 58% voted for President Obama, which "makes the results all the more fascinating," Higgins writes. A "key finding" of the survey is that "most women like their own [health] care," with 74% rating their current plan as good or excellent and 77% rating it is as "equal to or better than what others receive," she writes. Sixty-six percent of respondents said their insurance was good or excellent, and 73% said they have appropriate or high-quality insurance, Higgins says.

In addition, the survey found that 75% of women either want their current health care changed only slightly (40%) or believe that it is better left alone (35%), according to Higgins, who adds that 64% said they "would rather have private insurance than a government-run plan." Higgins writes that the results of the survey are partly due to "the expectation that government-run health care will create new problems." For example, 46% "worry that government-run health care will result in more doctors leaving medicine," and 51% "think it will cause a decline in the quality of health care," she writes. According to Higgins, it is "clear that women value their right to spend their own money to purchase the private insurance they want, and object to penalizing those who choose not to participate in whatever a distant bureaucrat deems acceptable" (Higgins, Wall Street Journal, 11/3).