When it comes to women's healthcare, the scene has drastically changed since the last decade. Now, pre-clinical research focuses on benefits for woman's health. Greater numbers of women have access to preventive care like birth control and cancer screenings. Most importantly, insurance companies are not allowed to charge women more for insurance, like they used to do until the last decade.
The women's healthcare sector is expected to witness drastic changes in 2017. Here are some predictions about the same.
More paid leaves for mothers
Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been showing President-elect Donald Trump under negative light ever since he declared his intention to contest presidential elections. His plans are definitely good and he aims to bring several missing regulations in place. One of them is helping mothers by offering six weeks of paid leaves. There is no doubt that paid maternity leaves would immensely benefit women's health. Perhaps, the US is the only developed country that does not have such regulation in place.
Number of obstetrician and gynecologist under insurance networks may drop
This sounds rude, but reimbursement offered to OB/GYN by insurance companies is not increase as per inflation and other factors. Thus, these days several leading chains as well as health care companies prefer to drop their name from insurance company's network. This means, 2017 will see more of these names dropping from the list and women will have a lesser number of obstetrician and gynecologist who support insurance.
Anyway, you can always use search engines to find the nearest option that is a part of insurance network, an example would be doing a search like: doctor near me in Meridian.
Women will slowly take charge of the women health care sector
Several studies have pointed out that most of the healthcare related decisions for family members are taken by women. Still, key positions at hospitals, healthcare companies, digital health startups and even insurance companies are occupied by men. In 2017, the industry may see more women rising and claiming positions like CEOs in this sector.
Greater numbers of nurse-midwives and nurse practitioners will step in to offer women's health care
Care from a physician is already hard to obtain in certain parts of the country and problems in insurance networks will make the situation even worse. This year, a greater number of nurse-midwives, nurse practitioners and other healthcare professionals will step in to offer primary health care wherever care from a doctor is difficult to obtain. Law to permit the same has already been passed in December 2016.
Increase in birth control and family planning device sales
More than 55 million women have access to free birth control under the Affordable Care Act. This is expected to change as soon as Trump administration takes charge as per most of the experts. Should we believe in the mainstream media that is doing everything possible to show Trump in a bad light? Well, most of the people won't. However, let's consider the worst-case scenario and go with medical experts who believe that ACA will be amended in a way that would take away free access to birth control. In such situation, they believe that sales percentage of long-acting reversible contraceptives and IUDs will drastically increase during 2017-18.