Women's (not Men's) Health

    Public Choice theory suggests that small groups with similar interests will be better able to lobby the government for favors than large groups that succumb to the free rider problem. Women's groups confound this notion by representing a large section of the population yet being able to gain significant rents for women. With the help of “more than 50 women’s organizations” women gained many different forms of screening, counselling and testing in the Affordable Care Act. Men do not have access to these services and their is no comparable increase in male health-care.
    One explanation is that benefits to women are a mere byproduct of the efforts of health care industries to seek regulation to limit entry and gain subsidies. Testing companies, women's counselling groups, and preventative care providers that specialize in services used more by women certainly benefit from the law. This explanation, however, doesn’t address why prostate cancer screening equipment manufacturers and other providers of men’s health services didn’t get men’s health regulation into the law.
    Using Becker’s model, the women’s lobby might be a leftover from when increasing legal protections for women was more beneficial to individual women; as they acquired the vote, property rights, and equal protection. Now these groups have much smaller gains to make from lobbying, but retain the structure that allows them to change political outcomes. The organizational structure is especially influential when compared to the men without national organizations for their benefit who would have to oppose women's groups. In Becker’s model, after some additional gains, the marginal benefit of lobbying will go down or the marginal impact of the loss from extra regulations will increase sufficiently to cause a reduction in the size and influence of the women’s lobby.