Briefly: Blumenthal calls for end of gender inequity in health insurance costs
Briefly: Blumenthal calls for end of gender inequity in health insurance costs
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73 called for federal legislation that would prohibit health insurers from using gender as a pay-rate determinant in individual coverage, according to a Tuesday press release. He said the cost discrepancies specifically put women under 40 — who pay between 6 and 48 percent more than men — at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to basic medical care. Twelve states, including New York and New Jersey, currently either prohibit or limit the use of gender as a factor in setting health insurance rates.
Comments
None 2 years, 12 months ago
@#2,
I find your understanding of how insurance companies underwrite business to be entirely incorrect.
This is how INSURANCE works in the private sector:
1- Insurance company uses the LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS to evaluate the credibility of a person's expected loss to their insurer, weighing frequency and severity of loss with inflation rates and legal expenses.
2- Insurance company charges the person a premium to cover: the expected loss, the insurer's expenses and a thin margin of profit.
This has nothing to do with "discrimination" or "begrudging" anyone. It has EVERYTHING to do with ensuring the solvency of the insurance company so that claims will be paid.
When the government interferes directly in coverage and pricing of insurance, it has the effect of raising the costs for many who would receive cheaper insurance in the standard market.
State run insurance funds, joint underwriting associations, and reinsurance pools are ways that society can spread the risk around.
But what you are arguing is economic tyranny. You want the government to tell health insurance companies how to underwrite.
The government cannot even service our national parks or balance their own fiscal budget. How do we expect them to understand the myriad loss exposures presented by the millions who inhabit this country?
Blumenthal is a clown because he claims this omnipotence. Similar attempts have bankrupted state insurance funds in the past.
Insurance is one of the world's oldest financial instruments. It has proven itself capable of effectively managing its own affairs and producing a product that serves its market purpose.
The CT attorney general does not have such strong historical credibility.
None 3 years ago
@1,
Okay, so would you be happy with insurers asking your race, and charging more to certain races based on predicted costs? Or how about insurers require you to take a genetic test, and if you have a high future risk of a disease, then they charge you through the nose? Or what about your actual current medical condition: how about every time you get sick, and especially if you get diagnosed with something really expensive, like cancer, insurers jack up your rates, just as your car insurance rate goes up with an accident. Insurers would love to do that if they could.
The question of which data insurers are allowed to use to set rates is entirely a public policy question. Insurers would love to use all kinds of variables to "charge the appropriate premium given the risk of the insured," as you blithely put it. However, we do not let them. Government prohibits insurers from using all kinds of data such as race, sex (in some states), genetic conditions (by [new] federal law), changes in medical conditions, et cetera. We refuse to let insurers use all variables because we want insurance to serve the social function of POOLING risk. People without a genetic predisposition to Huntington's disease subsidize people with it. If Blumenthal gets his way, then people who aren't going to get pregnant -- men and women who never have children -- subsidize those who are going to get pregnant.
Because pregnancy is a burden that falls heavily on one sex and not at all on the other, Blumenthal's proposed approach will help reduce one small gender inequality that currently serves no social purpose. You apparently were lucky enough to avoid the "risks" of pregnancy because you were born a guy. Congratulations. That doesn't mean you should begrudge everyone else the right to live in a world where that particular set of risks is pooled, so that insurance premiums, at least, can be equal & gender blind.
In contrast, we let insurers use smoking as a variable, charging smokers more. That's because we think this serves a useful purpose: pushing smokers to quit. Whether that's right or not, it's pretty hard to see what purpose it would serve to do the same with sex.
I find it disappointing that some guy who's apparently a senior at Yale College would fail so utterly to understand an issue of this kind that he'd lash out at what he doesn't understand and call our AG a "clown." Please, next time, try to think a little harder, or do a little research, or something. This stuff is not that hard to understand.
None 3 years ago
From other articles I've read about this, I believe pregnancy is not covered by most insurance plans. Women must purchase an extra rider to cover those expenses. Therefore, it's not pregnancy that's the cause of the increased cost.
Apparently, what some sources say is that women go to the doctor more often and so are charged more for insurance, on top of paying the co-pay or whatever. This is a) really gender-based, because some individual men probably go more than some individual women and b) dumb, because going for preventative care more often probably saves money down the road. The stereotype that men don't go to the doctor apparently saves them money - but then we all pay for drastic treatment when they are hospitalized for something that could have been caught earlier. It can't just be my dad who seems like he'd rather perform his own surgery than go to the doctor?
None 3 years ago
This is absurd.
Health insurance policies are underwritten in order to charge the appropriate premium given the risk of the insured.
Women- with their associated risks of pregnancy (to which men have no equivalent) are a greater cost to the health care system and so should pay more in premiums.
Blumenthal is a clown who understands none of the businesses he tries to regulate to death.
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