In an interview with Vanity Fair, congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said that Medicare should cover the cost of wigs for people who experience hair loss due to medical treatments or disease.
The politician opened up and shared her experience of having suffered from alopecia, an autoimmune disease that attacks healthy hair follicles and ends in hair loss.
“When you feel like your body is betraying you and you feel less like yourself—that’s already challenging,” she told the magazine, adding, but “to be bald as a woman really does disrupt conventional and societal norms of what is appropriate, what is professional, what is attractive, what is feminine,” she said. “It’s so much more than cosmetic. …It takes a real toll.”
Pressley highlighted that wigs may cost up to several thousand dollars, and the cost “can be out of reach for people with low or fixed incomes.”
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Pressley and Representative James McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, reintroduced a bill requiring Medicare to pay for “cranial prosthetics,” which is a term for medical wigs. The representative initially came up with the bill in 2018, before Pressley ever took office in Congress, to classify prosthetics as durable medical equipment.
In a previous interview with the outlet, McGovern said that he grew awareness for the cause after a constituent who makes the prosthetics for cancer patients brought it to his attention, “Doctors have told me that patients have refused lifesaving cancer treatments because they were afraid they were going to lose their hair and didn’t know how to deal with it,” he said.
“This is about basic human dignity and respect,” McGovern said. “It’s a simple legislative fix, and I think it’ll have a profound impact,” Pressley added.
Both McGovern and Pressley wish for the congresswoman’s public battle with her disease to be a beacon for the issue to grow awareness and be pushed through the Chamber to pass.
