Women's incomes are lower than men's incomes, and they must stretch fewer financial resources over longer lives. Seven out of 10 Medicare beneficiaries living below poverty are women. The increased likelihood that women will live alone in their later years places them at increased risk of poverty. As important as Medicare coverage is to women, its benefits are outdated. The combination of greater health problems and lower income causes women on Medicare to spend 22 percent of their income on health care compared to 17 percent for men.
Older women tend to have more chronic illnesses that require medication to manage.
This discriminates against women, who comprise nearly three-fourths of people in this age group. It also charges more at a time where income has declined. - About 7.3 million women on Medicare have no coverage to help pay for their prescription drug costs. Despite their lower average income, fully half of these women without drug coverage have income above 150 percent of poverty, underscoring the importance of drug coverage for people of all age groups. In recent years, just one in seven women without supplemental insurance used Medicare-covered mammograms. One study found that in 1993, only 37 percent of Medicare beneficiaries without supplemental insurance had Pap smears, compared with 59 percent of women who had supplemental insurance.