BY MARTHA BURK | Democrats in Congress celebrated a huge win last week with final passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, officially signed into law on Tuesday by President Biden. Originally dubbed Build Back Better, the bill was festooned like a Christmas tree with provisions ranging from slowing climate change, to child tax credits, and a variety of other measures to beef up support for working families. But in the end, it had to be trimmed to squeak through the Senate, with all Democrats voting in favor and Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. The bill also passed the House with zero help from Republicans. Major elements to slow global warming and help for Americans with health insurance and sky high drug prices survived.
Okay, so we didn’t get universal pre-kindergarten, lower childcare costs, paid family and sick leave and the enhanced child tax credit—all provisions that got dropped in the spirit of “compromise” with Republicans who insisted on tax protection for their mega-million corporate cronies. (Funny how those so-called compromises always seem to throw women—and children—overboard first.) But overall, women can celebrate the passage of legislation that will benefit them for years to come.
There’s quite a bit of good news. Women are the big winners when it comes to the healthcare provisions in the new law, which makes the most substantial changes to national healthcare policy since passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. For starters, it will limit the amount Medicare recipients have to pay out of pocket for drugs to $2,000 annually—a major benefit for older women, because they’re the majority of older Americans, outnumbering men on Medicare 55.6 to 44.4 percent.
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