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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) rejected Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
WASHINGTON — Wisconsin is in the midst of dramatically restructuring a health care program for low-income women, attributing the move to the Affordable Care Act. The changes have taken women’s health advocates by surprise, and they are now trying to convince the state that setting a six-month timeline to dramatically alter the program is unnecessary and could leave many women without services for breast and cervical cancer.
The Wisconsin Well Woman Program provides preventative health screening services to low-income women who are uninsured or underinsured. The program, which has been around for nearly 20 years, is funded by both the state and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and has been credited with providing more than 500,000 breast and cervical cancer screenings to more than 70,000 women.
Wisconsin’s system is designed to help women locally, with a “coordinating agency” in each of the state’s 72 counties aimed at helping women navigate the system of more than 1,000 participating providers.
But on July 1, this entire system is set to change: There will be just 5-10 coordinating agencies in the state and only a handful of health care providers. And although the restructuring is set to go into effect in just a few months, no one knows who those providers will be.
“There are women who are being screened and detected for cancer now who cannot schedule their follow-up appointment because no one knows who the providers will be after July,” said Sara Finger, executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services first announced the change on Dec. 12, when WWWP Director Gale Johnson sent providers a memo telling them about the changes and saying they had six months to get ready. She attributed the downsizing to the fact that the Affordable Care Act now requires employers to fully cover many preventative services, such as mammograms and certain chemoprevention drugs.