Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius may work in a Democratic administration, but her position on women’s well-being is anything but political: “Healthy, strong women are essential to having healthy, strong children and communities,” she says. “But too often, women place the needs of others before their own.”
To ensure that budgetary concerns don’t keep women from seeing their physicians, Sebelius, 64, helped push through the Affordable Care Act. As a result, starting this past summer, all new insurance plans are required to stop charging co-pays for such things as FDA-approved contraception, breast-feeding support, mammograms, domestic violence screening, flu shots, and more. Also launched on her watch: the Million Hearts campaign, which aims to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes—the leading killers of women—over the next five years. And since there’s nothing like regular physical activity and good nutrition to keep us in the pink, she also reinvigorated the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition. Now those are causes we can get behind.
