There are lots of abhorrent policies that health insurance companies have enacted to try to make the most profit and dole out the least amount of health care that they can.
We're probably all familiar with their tactic of recission, which is to retroactively cancel a person's insurance policy if they are diagnosed with a serious illness by doing a thorough investigation to find some unlisted "existing precondition," regardless of whether it's related to their new diagnosis or not.
When they're not sentencing people to death for forgetting to mention their chickenpox in the second grade, they're still doing some less dramatic but still morally repugnant things. One I'd like to discuss is what I've dubbed "The Uterus Tax."
According to a number of studies, insurance companies typically charge women more than men for the same services, at least until later in life. Indeed, it seems, being a woman is a preexisting condition of sorts.
As the NYT reported today:
According to a 2008 study by the National Women’s Law Center, companies that practice so-called gender rating charge a 25-year-old woman up to 48 percent more than they charge a 25-year-old man...
Women who are insured through their employers tend to be protected by federal laws that bar sex discrimination. But those who buy insurance through the individual market face a variety of problems.
There's your efficient free-market at work!
Insurance companies do not deny the allegation. In fact, they acknowledge this as being accurate and seem to have no qualms about it. After all, reported The Chicago Tribune:
Insurers say they have a sound reason for charging more: Women age 19 to 55 typically use more health care, especially in the childbearing years.
Oh, so it's a childbearing thing? Birthing a child in a hospital and all the other medical costs related to maternity can be fairly expensive. So this would explain the price gap, correct?
Well, no. Because as the study the NYT reported on today notes:
The study also found that most insurance companies in the individual market did not cover maternity care.
So what is it, then, that makes insurance so much more expensive for women? Apparently this:
In general, insurers say, they charge women more than men of the same age because claims experience shows that women use more health-care services. They are more likely to visit doctors, to get regular checkups, to take prescription medications and to have certain chronic illnesses.
Women have the audacity to try and actually use the insurance they're paying for. Imagine if your phone company screened people by their demographic information and determined your monthly charge based on how often their formulas predicted you'd use the phone.
This is just one more reason why we need to pass healthcare reform. The same NYT article notes:
The health care bills in Congress would require maternity coverage and would generally bar insurance companies from charging women, even in their childbearing years, more than men.
Imagine that. Women wouldn't have to pay more for something because of the risk they might actually use it.
Our insurance companies charge premiums for those who might actually use their services and weasel out of contracts for those who try to use the services they paid for a little too much.
We need health-care reform to stop these abusive practices. We need a strong public option so there is actually a threat by the way of competition to insurers who punish people for staying healthy.