Women readers, get ready to fight. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Blue Cross Blue Shield of California has decided to charge women more for health care insurance than men. A California woman, Tova Hack, works part-time, and has to buy her own individual health care policy because her employer doesn’t provide health insurance for her. She found out that the cost of her high- deductible, bare-bones individual policy was going up 20 percent. The increase couldn’t be due to the possibility of pregnancy, because her policy didn’t cover pregnancy-related expenses. Blue Cross Blue Shield simply discovered that women are more expensive to insure than men and decided to stick them with the costs.
Blue Cross Blue Shield’s reasoning was straightforward. Insurance companies encourage preventive services. However, their actuarial studies show that, unlike seniors who don’t use insurance company rebates to sign up to join a gym and save the company money, women actually use preventive services, like mammograms and pap smears that cost the insurance company money.
And if, unlike Tova’s policy, their insurance policies do cover prenatal and obstetric services, women understandably seek that care when they are pregnant. Blue Cross Blue Shield of California concluded that women should pay more for their insurance policies than men, since women contribute more to the insurance company’s “medical losses.” (“Medical loss” is insurance-speak for money the company has to pay out for medical care. The ideal scenario for an insurance company is for no one to use the money paid in premiums for actual health care). Insurance companies carve out risk pools to reduce the likelihood that the people they insure will use health care services. Women, it seems, are just too risky.
Meanwhile health insurance company CEOs are receiving benefits that defy belief. For example, Larry Glasscock of Wellpoint left the company in 2007 with a farewell package of $23.9 million. And health insurance company stocks continue to provide revenue for their shareholders, even as primary care doctors, who actually provide medical care, earn less and less.
The Kaiser Foundation health tracking poll recently found that 25 percent of people reported having problems paying for health care and health insurance, and 59 percent said, “We need to get everyone into the same insurance pool so we can spread the costs of sick and healthy people over the whole population.”
If we eliminate the multiple, for-profit insurance companies and have a single-payer health care system, funded and administered by the government, everyone would be in the same risk pool. Women would not have to pay more for health insurance because they take good care of themselves by getting pap smears, mammograms and prenatal care. Women would not be discriminated against because they are the ones who get pregnant, have babies, and use obstetrical services. Women would not be punished just for being women.
If the multiple private health insurance companies were eliminated, $350 billion in administrative funds would be saved. These funds could be used to cover everyone with a universal, comprehensive, single-payer health insurance that would provide not only medical care and prescription drugs, but would also pay for long term care for our seniors.
Recently, at the national convention of the League of Women Voters, women voted unanimously to make advocacy for, and education about, health care reform a top priority. Women have fought long and hard for their rights in the past decades. It is time for them to take on the insurance companies, and fight for their right to affordable and accessible health care.
Originally published in the Berkshire Eagle