Health insurers discriminate against women

This one sent my outrage-o-meter off the charts: The New York Times is reporting that women pay significantly more for individual health insurance than men do, and the difference persists even when you consider only insurance that doesn’t cover childbirth. One insurance company, Anthem in Columbus, Ohio, charges 30-year-old women almost 50 percent more than men the same age.

The health insurance companies claim that women go to the doctor more often and have more lingering health problems. Just when you thought you couldn’t get more offended, read what the spokesperson for one of the insurers, Humana, said by way of justification, which just justified my belief that insurers are the lowest blood-suckers of the earth: “Bearing children increases other health risks later in life, such as urinary incontinence, which may require treatment with medication or surgery.” Screw you, too, buddy. As if having to suffer humiliating long-term medical issues as a result of helping continue the human race weren’t unfair enough, he has to throw it in our faces as an excuse for ripping us off? (See my earlier post.)

The article quotes Marcia Greenberger, a lawyer for the National Women’s Law Center criticizing the discriminatory practices. Greenberger claims that this practice can’t be justified by actuarial principles. That may be true—men probably incur more costs associated with heart attacks, say—but it misses what seems to me the deeper lesson. If anything is by rights a social cost, the burden of childbirth is. That our current system lays this cost at the feet of individual women throws into dramatic relief the utter bankruptcy of our system of treating health care as a private issue. The only insurance pool that makes sense is all of society, as (historical paradox though it is) United Autoworkers founder Walter Reuther saw. Or, as Malcolm Gladwell has put it, we should ditch the actuarial model of insurance for a social model of insurance.

These gender disparities show what a discriminatory dead-end efforts, like John McCain’s, to further privatize the system are. Greenberger notes that tax credits for health insurance—like those McCain would offer—would be worth less to women than men because of the higher premiums they face.

If McCain wins, and implements his health care plan, further privatizing the costs of reproduction, I suggest women go on reproductive strike. (Not a new idea, I’ll admit, although we’ve got one up on the Athenians, since we could go on reproductive strike without going on sex strike, at least until McCain and Palin outlaw abortion and contraception.)