Are You With Us For A Guarantee of Quality, Affordable Health Care For All?

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Who We Are

The Healthcare Equality Project (HEP) is a national partnership between nationwide and community-based organizations, faith networks, students, parents and individuals working to achieve comprehensive health care reform that will eliminate healthcare disparities once and for all. We want to ensure that healthcare reform efforts- beyond simply expanding insurance coverage - become an engine for reducing the unfair, pervasive and life-threatening healthcare disparities that plague women, racial, ethnic and other minorities. Our nation urgently needs healthcare that works for everyone!

The Healthcare Equality Project was created to bring together diverse organizations to develop and implement a strategy to integrate healthcare equality solutions into the broader reform effort. A central piece of this strategy is to unite, strengthen, and amplify the voices from communities of color in the fight for healthcare equality.

Why It Matters

We know that our healthcare system is in critical condition, but for some Americans, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, the crisis runs even deeper. For far too long, African Americans, Latinos, Asian and Pacific Islanders and Native Americans have endured systemic healthcare inequalities that have resulted in greater suffering from chronic diseases, shorter life spans, and an overall lower quality of life. Even among the insured, glaring disparities exist between these communities and their white counterparts in the access to and quality of care for nearly every ailment.

The Healthcare Equality Project, aims to be an organizing platform at which many different types of organizations - labor, social justice, healthcare advocacy, consumer, and religious groups and everything in between - can come together with a simple, unified message for our elected leaders: We need a just healthcare system that improves the health and well being of ALL Americans with concrete investments in eliminating healthcare disparities.

Recent Items

You've taken a ticket. Now what?

Thousands of people have taken a ticket for gender equity in health care. (We're currently at 2,689 people in line.)

Want to play a bigger role in fighting insurance co. discrimination against women? We rigged our toll-free phone line to direct calls to male members of Congress.

Insurance Companies Consider C-section Birth "Pre-Existing Condition"
Did you know that most insurance companies on the individual market consider pregnancy "optional"? The fetus is viewed as an uncovered "pre-existing condition," and therefore not something that's necessary for insurance companies to insure. Many insurers also consider a Cesarean section pregnancy a "pre-existing condition"--and refuse to provide health coverage for women who have had the procedure.
Making Kennedy's Vision for America a Reality
For five decades, Senator Kennedy stood with working families to fight for our shared vision of America where every family has access to affordable healthcare, every worker has a paycheck that supports a family, and every child is guaranteed a brighter future. Let's continue to make Kennedy's vision for America a reality by taking action this year to pass healthcare reform.
Robin Holland: My Brain Tumor Won't Wait for Reform
Robin Holland's story is sadly, not unusual. Diagnosed with brain cancer after a car accident in 1993, Robin had no health insurance at the time. She waited for 5 weeks, wrapped in bandages, while her doctor decided whether he would operate on her for free, and while she waited to be approved for Medicaid.
Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr: "Healthcare must be our lunch counter moment for the 21st century"
Today's hip-hop "Healthcare Remix" panel discussion at SEIU's headquarters in Washington, DC shed a bright light on the need for healthcare reform that does more than just expand insurance coverage--and why it is imperative that every community has a voice at the decision-making table.
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