Health Task Force

CAlifornia Women's Agenda

TASK FORCE ON HEALTH

"In California women's and girls' health needs can only be achieved by establishing health care as a right"

Convenors: Roma Guy and Sono Aibe
Facilitator: Charlie Toledo

CALIFORNIA VISION STATEMENT

To establish that Health Care is a right in California for all women and girls

In California, women's and girls health needs, based on the definition of health of the World Health Organization, can only be achieved by establishing health care as a right. This means as women and girls we would be establishing health care as a right for all people in California. For California this means a paradigm shift from the tiered, privileged-based, health care system which currently determines and impacts the quality and quantity of services, data collection, research, and accessibility. This includes a system in which very few women and girls can avail themselves of health care disallowing holistic and environmental approaches or true primary care, prevention or equal access to specific populations with special needs such as women/girls with disabilities, rural women and girls, immigrant women and girls etc.

Health Care as a right establishes a new standard of care and and a new standards of equal access and public accountability for where the public and private health resources are expended. It provides for a more comprehensive approach to special and/or complex needs of any given California population of women and girls. For example, gender related reproductive care or needed services for older women compared to girl children in infancy. As long as we have privileged health care, not a system based on health care as a right, and as long as we do not make it a priority to build a consensus for some formally structured universal health care system of program and services including data collection and research, services will continue to be fragmented, and unequal, redundant and inefficient no matter how committed, competent any one person or group of providers, activists or policy makers are.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

GOAL I: To establish strategies by which California women and girls can dialogue and devise plans and programs demonstrating the improvement of health care under a 'health care as a right' agenda.

OBJECTIVES:

1. To develop and support strategies and programs which promote health care as a right. To date this is expressed in concepts of universal health care. Work with local communities, activists, legislators, policy makers who seek to establish projects and programs based on universal health care priorities.

2. To organize a working committee of women and girls who would develop a health care "package" of basic primary care services and funding mechanism for all women and girls in California.

GOAL II: To provide opportunities and a rationale for dialogue among women and girls illustrating health in a rights-based health care system vs. the current privileged based system.

OBJECTIVES:

1. To invite and provide a forum for reproductive rights policy makers and activists to examine what reproductive health and services would look like in a health care rights California vs. what reproductive rights looks like in a health care system that is based on the current privileged system with Managed Care, Medical, Medicare, Special Population funding etc. Illustrate how it would be different to provided universal health care in California? Would it cost more than we spend now? Where would we spend less or more or differently? The same approach and illustration could be accomplished by examining disability, environmental health, violence prevention, a basic primary care "package" for all residents etc.,.

2. To investigate who and which organization in California has explored and made the paradigm shift to a "health care as right" perspective and organize a cooperative mechanism for dialogue and dissemination of each other's recommendations etc. (For example, Santa Cruz County and San Diego documents documents developed for the CAWA Assembly along with disabled and other issues presented. )

GOAL III: To examine current health care priority programs through the prisms of (1) cultural value i.e., a standard that health care is a human right for all California; (2) impact on structure i.e., policies, infrastructure, mechanisms of deliver of services; (3) identify special needs of diverse populations and assure that they are integrated in a seamless delivery of care system.

OBJECTIVES:

1. To investigate and work with people who are currently knowledgeable on health care priorities who want to transform our current and needed programs into a health care as a rights agenda. This would include people who have developed special needs programs for special populations such as Pacific Islander women and girls' reproductive health to collecting statistics on morbidity and mortality of undocumented pregnant women.

2. To work with women and girls who are focused on Healthy People 2000 in California to establish how in a health care rights paradigm we could achieve the three major goals of Health People (women and girls) 2000. The three major goals incorporate the WHO definition of Health and are: (1) Increase the span of healthy life for Californians; (2) Reduce health disparities among Californians; (3) Achieve access to prevention services for all Americans.

3. Assure that the issues and target populations left-out of the Plan for Action from the Fourth World Women's Conference are part of the CAWA health agenda. As identified by the CAWA Assembly, June 1996: The health priority #3 does not:

Include that Health Care needs to be established as a right for all women and girls no matter their socio-economic and cultural status of their nation and local community;
Focus on needs of disabled women and girls;
Have a component on financing health care needs, services and research;
Identify the special condition and thus health-related needs indigenous women and girls;
Focus on research and training issues related to quality health care planning and the development of services such as training in holistic health;
Develop the role and importance of media in health care;
Indentify how racism distorts and creates unequal health care and recommend best practices to provide equal health care status;
Identify transportation as a critical factor in providing quality health care;
Integrate the need for childcare in a comprehensive health care system;
Include a priority to provide services and care for all women and girls no matter what their immigrant or refugee status.
Offer the value and positive effect of holistic health and medicine as an integral part of any quality healthy care system.

Adopted by the Health Task Force of the California Women's Agenda Assembly on June 29, 1996

To add your voice to the California Task Force Report on Health, send comments on what has happened in your region and recommendations to: info@winaction.org

Use the side bar on the left to navigate to other Task Force Reports. Otherwise, downloading the entire CAWA Report at once requires Acrobat Reader.

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©1998, 1999 Women's Intercultural Network, all rights reserved. This page last updated November 29, 1999 by Trista T Genova. WIN Home Page

©1998, 1999 Women's Intercultural Network, all rights reserved. This page last updated November 29, 1999 by Trista T Genova. Comments and suggestions regarding this site may be sent to win@win-cawa.org