The $20 Billion Question: What Counts As Women's Health？
The strategy‘s $4 billion data pillar aims to fix the gaps in women’s health data before the next generation of diagnostic tools is trained on them. getty The American Heart Association endorsed a women‘s health framework this month. So did the Lupus Foundation of America, the Arthritis Foundation, the National MS Society, UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, the COPD Foundation, and Prevent Blindness. That list should stop you. Cardiology, rheumatology, neurology, pulmonology, and ophthalmology signed onto a document about womens health. In all, 37 organizations endorsed it. Either they wandered into the wrong room or the room is bigger than anyone had acknowledged. The document is the National Strategy to Close the Women‘s Health Gap, released July 15 by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society for Women’s Health Research, and the Women First Research Coalition. It asks Congress for $20 billion over a decade. But the number isn‘t the argument. The argument is that women’s health has been filed as a specialty for 30 years, and that the filing is a reason the money never came. It‘s Not Just Reproductive Care. It’s Nearly All Of Medicine The womens health gap is the shortfall in research, data, and clinical evidence for conditions that affect women uniquely, disproportionately, or differently.
