Blumenthal Voices Support for Veterans and Women’s Health Care

Wednesday afternoon, Senator Richard Blumenthal attended a luncheon for the New Canaan League of Women Voters. The luncheon, which took place in a dining room at the Country Club of New Canaan, was without an unfilled seat.

Blumenthal began his discussion with his thoughts on women’s health, offering a short and concise idea of where he stands on this issue.

“Part of what I have been doing is stopping bad things from happening. It makes no sense to defund Planned Parenthood,” he said.

A good part of the room applauded, agreeing with the Senator’s statement.

“First of all, on the issue of abortion, only a small part of the work Planned Parenthood is doing is abortions. They provide cancer screenings and prenatal care,” he said.

With hospitals, Medicaid and Medicare on the minds of many, Blumenthal brought up the efforts of all three.

“We ought to be very proud of the hospitals in Connecticut,” he stated. “Medicaid is working to ease up on pressure in emergency rooms; I think that it will be a continuing effort in this area.”

With one-fourth of births in Connecticut funded by Medicaid, Blumenthal said government needs to make more of an effort to make both the experience of patients and hospitals easier. One of the hindrances he sees in making healthcare more accessible comes from the Consumer Financial Product Commission.

“Essentially, for opponents of Consumer Protection, coming forward is to rob and reduce funding,” Blumenthal said.

Senator Blumenthal on Veterans

Blumenthal spoke passionately on the state of United States military veterans.

“This country is failing its veterans,” he stated. “Tonight about 100,000 United States veterans will be homeless. One in four veterans in their twenties are unemployed, that’s double the rate of their peers. You are double as likely to be unemployed if you serve this country.”

Blumenthal, who is on the Armed Services Committee, has proposed a bill called Honoring All Veterans.

“This bill, I think, is really important,” Blumenthal said. “This is a bi-partisan issue that this country has an obligation to keep.”

Questions and Answers

After his prepared remarks, the League of Women Voters provided a list of questions for the Senator to answer. One question pertained to Blumenthal’s efforts to interact with other members of government and the way he goes about it.

“There’s no sort of set procedure,” he stated. “We talk frequently; I will see all of our congress men and women each weekend because we all come home. There is a school of thought that government worked better when people in my position couldn’t go home on the weekends. [Government officials and representatives] used to be captives in Washington,” he joked. “There’s nothing like a social relationship to soften the edges.”

Last Tuesday’s debt ceiling outcome was on the list next.

“I believe we do need to raise the debt ceiling, but also cut spending,” Blumenthal said. “We need to do it together. I believe there will be tough negotiations. We need to cut healthcare costs, we need to go after wasteful and unnecessary spending. There are millions, even billions of dollars that we have failed to recover. “

With Medicare stating it would not be able to satisfy its obligations by 2024, Blumenthal said action needs to be taken immediately.

“Reducing healthcare costs has to be done,” he told the group. “We need to eliminate waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid programs.”

Other efforts that Blumenthal thinks would be beneficial to Connecticut are the continued manufacturing of submarines in Connecticut, continued fuel cell usage due to the fact that Connecticut is the fuel cell capital of the United States, and a potential energy policy put in place by the government.

Health Effects for Single Moms

Unmarried mothers face poorer health at midlife than do women who have children after marriage, according to a new study.

This is the first U.S. study, led by Kristi Williams, associate professor of Sociology at the Ohio State University, to document long-term negative health effects for unwed mothers.

About 40 percent of all U.S. births are to unmarried women, compared to fewer than 10 percent in 1960, Williams said. This suggests there will soon be a population boom of single mothers suffering middle-aged health problems.

“We are soon going to have a large population of single mothers who are entering midlife, when many health problems just begin to emerge,” Williams was quoted as saying. “This is a looming public health crisis that has been pretty much ignored by the public and by policymakers.”

In addition, the study suggests that later marriage doesn’t usually help reverse the negative health consequences of having a first birth outside of marriage. This calls into question that government’s effort to promote marriage among low-income, single mothers, at least in terms of the consequences for these women’s health.

In one analysis, the researchers used data on 3,391 and a second analysis involved data on 1,150 women. By 2008, the researchers had data on marriages and other unions for a 29 year period.

Most notably, the results shows Hispanic women who had a first child outside a marriage didn’t have the same negative health effects at 40 that white and black women did. Researchers believe this is because Hispanic women may have children out of wedlock, but it’s usually in a long-lasting cohabitation that mocks marriage.

“Research has clearly shown the toll that long-term stress takes on health, and we know that single mothers have a great deal of stress in their lives,” Williams said. “Their economic problems only add to the problem.”

“Marriage tends to help by providing women with economic and social support, but black women are disadvantaged in marriage in both of those respects,” Williams said.