American Women are screwed
By louisehartmann
Putting aside the Republican's war on women for a moment – a new report from the National Women’s Law Center reveals that health insurance companies are charging women in American an extra billion dollars annually, and it's just good old fashioned gender discrimination. The report finds that the practice of for-profit health insurers charging women more than men for identical coverage is widespread – and states are doing little to stop the rip-off. In the states that don’t ban health insurance gender discrimination, 92% of the best-selling plans charge women more than men.
President Obama’s Affordable Care Act would ban this practice nationally – saving women a billion dollars a year. Unfortunately for women – Republicans are working as hard as they can to repeal Obamacare.
Comments
#2
Do men pay more for car insurance? Is that gender descrimination? I think it's more about actuarial tables and less about gender descrimination.
#3
On the other hand....if it is assumed that women have more medical problems than men....can we also not assume that men are usually the cause of those problems? And, if the "actuarial tables" are so sexist maybe they are racist as well. Maybe they are elitist? Do they show that rich people live longer than poor...and so the rich should pay less for healthcare? Do they not go by zip code perhaps revealing whether you live in a well-to-do location...or, a low-rent high crime area? Maybe they collect information on what we likely imbibe or what we eat...using information on our credit cards or supermarket discount cards.
Yes, I'm sure these actuarial tables go on a lot of data to pin-point who is a good risk and who is a bad. Insurance companies are profit driven rackets that will coldly soak you for all your money and try their darnedest not to have to give out any. They use all the psychological tricks through marketing to make you feel very insecure and overly worried about sickness and death. They will make you believe that they are an indispensable necessity while they milk you dry and then try to find any trick or lie to keep from having to pay when the time comes ("pre-existing conditions").
They have special departments assigned to the task of finding out little bits of arcane information about you that they can use as an excuse to use as a "pre-existing condition" so that they can renege on having to "cover" your major illness.
And, with social networking, they can find out an awful lot about you as you, or your friends just happen to mention the time when...... Or, what information on ills and cures you search for on the internet. They are amassing all this information on you to be used to wiggle out of their part of the coverage.
What about covert collection of DNA from prior blood samples...perhaps collected without your knowledge? They could, perhaps, get a good idea of what genetic misfortunes you are likely to have inherited. Unlike inheriting a lot of money from wealthy parents, the blue-bloods and silver-spoon in the mouth types may have inherited traits that would look very, very bad to an actuarial table. Of course, you may have plenty of money and wouldn't care...unless, for some reason, one day, you lost all of your money and had to just scrape by. Then you too would not be able to afford the insurance premiums.
We need government to regulate, and keep everyone safe from these gangland empires.... not act as their bully-boy, strong-arm payment enforcers.
Women are not usually the ones to start wars against other nations. And the major waste of our tax dollars have been on the stupid illegal wars and trying to force our will on other peoples, stealing their raw materials...all done by stupid and greedy men. How many thousands..or hundreds of thousands of men come back from these wars with major physical or psychological problems that all have to be dealt with by our tax dollars?
It's time for our government to grab these greedy bastard insurance companies, and Banksters, and Wall Street Ponzi Schemers, and the MIC by their throats and squeeze till we return to sanity. We need universal single-payer health care like every other civilized first-world countries. We need to stop invading other countries. Most of these ills are done by men. But I doubt if those actuarial tables contain any of these facts. They just target the weak and the meek.
Well, women can very easily grab us by the balls and do some squeezing. And you don't mess with women scorned, ticked off, and mobilized. The Greek Play Lysistrata, by Aristophanes, was a fun lesson of what could be done.
#4
Comparing health insurance to car insurance is a bit silly, but I'll play.
First, not all men pay more, its based on age--and young women do pay more than older women, for the same reasons--younger people have more accidents/tickets, its just boys have more than girls.
But if we use your premise that this is not discrimination, but based on actuarial tables, women do, on average, use medical care more often as preventive care, the cheapest form of medicine whereas men usually only go to the doctor when there's been an ongoing problem...which leads to more expensive care and more money that the insurance has to pay out...so, using your premise that boys pay more because of serious complications, men should pay more for health care because of the serious complications that not going to the doctor on a regular basis!
#5
Excellent point!
#6
All women are screwed one way or another.
#7
It usually takes two paychecks now to support a family. If these Republican men who are trying to control women would like to earn twice as much, then maybe the women who are married would not have to work. Like it was in the 1950's and 1960's. They complain about free health care. Who will take care of the women who have all these babies they seem to want women to have? These men are threatened by womens' strength. It's natural for them to feel like that.
#8
Unfortunately gender discrimination has been going on for decades in the pricing of health insurance premiums. In the early 1960s I considered buying health insurance from Mutual of Omaha. As I reviewed their literature, I learned that as a single woman I would be paying higher premiums than a man or married woman for coverage that did NOT include maternity benefits. I was outraged at the disparity, so I questioned the agent. The Mutual of Omaha representative surely thought [erroneously] that I was in desperate need of maternity coverage because his reply to me was a statement saying that if they gave maternity benefits to single women, the company "would be paying for every little bastard in the state of New York". He didn't care that my argument was about higher cost for fewer benefits. I bought no insurance from him or any other company. Another decade passed before I had coverage through a larger employer. Thank you for keeping this and other issues in front of us!!
#9
I'm screwed because I don't have insurance because I can't get work. I apply for at least two jobs every week, but I'm over 50.
#10
Private Health Insurances are no good for a Public Healthcare System!
During the 90s private health insurers became mightier in Germany. It was basically a time when libertarianism was very popular there and many people felt like going the American way. But it looks like the Germans learned by watching us -- and they learned faster than we do. Under the conservative (!!) Merkel they really weakened the private health insurers. It became law, that EVERYBODY had to join public health insurance. Which actually closed the last gaps (basically freelancers who suffered in private insurances).
Yes siree, private insurers tend to screw women! A really Public Health Insurance would never do that. You can't trust banks, you can't trust private insurances, basically you can't trust corporations.....
If you're not silly, you rather trust public institutions. Government institutions are the only you can trust. Because you voted them in, people! All Government institutions are checked and balanced within our democratic system. Private institutions are NOT.
#11
Supreme Court sounds like the sun king:
L'état c'est nous!
Our majesty's fingers are to noble to touch Congress' lousy plebeian papers.
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I'm certainly against the discrimination against women for any reason...especially health care, or health care costs. And I would love to see healthcare for all AT AN AFFORDABLE PRICE FOR ALL.
Unfortunately, the way this Obamacare is set up, in collusion with the healthScare insurance companies, we could very well be discriminated against, not on the basis of sex, but on the basis of any claims we make against the insurance companies for medical care. They can raise their prices, if we have health or medical problems, as much as they can get away with.
I don't see our government regulating healthscare prices in the future. Now, if Obamacare had at least a government option (but single payer is the ideal) to give us a way to seek shelter from the rapacious healthscare monopolies, then Obamacare might be something other than a radicalized strong-arm payment enforcer to the healthscare insurance criminals. But, as usual, we just cannot rely on Obama to be anything but the effete, flip-flopping chicken and political butt-buddy of the rich and powerful....the ruling elite...Wall Street...big business...insurance scamsters.
And, I understand, Obama has now flip-flopped on the XL Keystone pipeline. He just keeps giving in to the Republicans. The ruling elite couldn't have it much better than this. The people, still having a modicum of hope based on their fictitious savior, Obama, is kept in-line and placidly numb.
By the way...interesting headline!!