The affordable care act is heralded as a step-up for affordable healthcare for Americans. Not surprisingly, the glaring holes in men's health are rarely talked about, and the ACA has blatantly discriminatory measures. Let's take a look:

Here is the .gov page for preventative services. Note three sections:

-for all adults

-for women

-for children

(This site has an easy to read layout, to.)

Notably, there is no men's section, and as such, prostate cancer isn't listed anywhere, and is not covered. You'll see in the women's section that breast and cervical cancer are covered. Keep in mind that prostate cancer causes significantly more deaths per year than cervical cancer:

Prostate cancer causes 29,430 deaths per year.

Cervical cancer causes 4190 deaths per year.

If a cancer that kills 4,000 people per year is covered, why isn't a cancer that kills 29,000 per year covered?

Now, let's look at the womens section where we can see several healthcare services offered only to women under ACA preventive services.

First, well women's visits- essentially, women get one free annual visit per year, for general health. This is obviously an example of blatantly discrimination, especially as men have higher mortality rates at every age of life (including before birth!) If a woman earning minimum wage needs to go to the doctor, she can just go for free. If a man earning minimum wage needs to go to the doctor, he may have to pay $100 or more- if he can't afford it, he doesn't get healthcare. Even if he gets billed after, it's a blatant economic discrimination, and might cause men to put off going to the doctor when it could improve or even save their lives.

This is partly where the confusion over the free annual physicals came from. This CNN article spells out that in fact, these annual physicals are only for women.

Next, osteoporosis. The justification for this is that osteoporosis occurs mainly in women- but osteoporosis affects two million men in the US, and some believe it to be underdiagnosed due to- big surprise- lack of screenings.

Two more services only offered for women are domestic violence screenings, and smoking cessation programs, both which obviously affect men to. It's very hypocritical considering the opposite argument is used for research into heart attack in women- because the majority of heart attacks occur in men, most heart attack research was performed on men. When women made up the smaller percentage of patients, it was considered sexist to ignore them just because they were a smaller percentage. But when it's men who make up the smaller percentage of patients, that's used to justify excluding them from covered preventive screening.

This shows more than just the prevalence of legalized discrimination, it shows which class has actual legal and societal privilege. If you were to reverse the genders for any of these, their would be an outcry. To me, this shows which gender is actually the socially privileged gender, and which one isn't- if there's one gender your allowed to discriminate against and one that you're not, the one that you're allowed to discriminate against isn't the privileged class.