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Tuesday, March 30, 2010
News / Biz 'Being a woman is no longer a pre-existing condition'
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 11:29 AM
Well. That's nice.
For decades, women have paid more for health insurance. A lot more. But, thanks to health care reform, that trend has come to an abrupt end.
In the broadest sense, the new health care law forbids sex discrimination in health insurance. Previously, there was no such ban, and insurance companies took full advantage of the void.Until now, it has been perfectly legal in most states for companies selling individual health policies — for people who do not have group coverage through employers — to engage in “gender rating,” that is, charging women more than men for the same coverage, even for policies that do not include maternity care. The rationale was that women used the health care system more than men. But some companies charged women who did not smoke more than men who did, even though smokers have more risks. The differences in premiums, from 4 percent to 48 percent, according to a 2008 analysis by the law center, can add up to hundreds of dollars a year. The individual market is the one that many people turn to when they lose their jobs and their group coverage.
Insurers have also applied gender-rating to group coverage, but laws against sex discrimination in the workplace prevent employers from passing along the higher costs to their employees based on sex. Gender rating has taken a particular toll on smaller or midsize businesses with many women, like home-health care, child care and nonprofits. As a result, some businesses have been unable to offer health coverage or have been able to afford it only by using plans with very high deductibles.
In addition, individual policies often excluded maternity coverage, or charged much more for it. Now, gender rating is essentially outlawed, and policies must include maternity coverage, considered “an essential health benefit.”
In a statement issued Thursday, Senator Mikulski said: “One of my hearings revealed that a woman was denied coverage because she had a baby with a medically mandated C-section. When she tried to get insurance coverage with another company, she was told she had to be sterilized in order to get health insurance. That will never, ever happen again because of what we did here with health care reform.”
Read the rest of this New York Times article, by Denise Grady, here.
Further reading:
- Youth pay a lot more for health premiums (A/MSNBC)
- Uninsured hoping for fast help from health care overhaul (Charlotte Observer)
From the U.S. Congress: How health care reform will help women:
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