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Nowhere to Turn: How the Individual Health Care Market Fails Women

Rachel

I’m going to try and assemble a coherent post but I ask for your patience – I was up half the night with a teething, sniffling, coughing baby.

Jill mentioned this the other day and I wanted to go back and point a big flashing arrow at it. The recent economic crisis drew some attention away from the conversation around health care and McCain’s dangerous health care proposal. You’ll recall that under the McCain plan, for the first time ever Americans would be taxed on their employer-paid health care benefits. It would end the tax exemptions employers now get for paying employees’ health care premiums. The result would be millions of Americans losing their employer-paid health care benefits, driving them out of group plans and onto the individual market.

This is all kinds of bad. It’s especially bad for women, and I’m going to let the National Women’s Law Center tell you why. In the past few weeks they’ve done some important work to explain the threat the individual health care market presents to women’s health.

[W]omen attempting to buy health insurance on the individual market often face higher premiums and fewer options for comprehensive and affordable coverage than their male counterparts. And in this economic and political climate, with employees facing layoffs and politicians emphasizing the use of the individual market as a “fix” to our health care crisis, this puts women in grave risk of not receiving the quality health care they need.

The New York Times did a piece on the report last week, and they editorialized on it today. (From this press shop girl: great work, NWLC!)

The biggest take-away is this: women face higher costs for less health coverage in the open market. That’s if we can find insurance at all. Women who get employer-paid health insurance are protected by federal law against gender discrimination. In the individual market, it’s up to states to ensure that women are protected from discriminatory insurance company policies, and most states offer little, is any such protection.

Click here to read the report, Nowhere to Turn: How the Individual Health Insurance Market Fails Women. There’s also an action where you can tell Congress to oppose any health care proposal that threatens to dump women into the individual health insurance market.

4 thoughts on Nowhere to Turn: How the Individual Health Care Market Fails Women

  1. Maybe it’s because of this election, but I got incredibly het up this weekend when I realized that my partner’s contact lens solution and condoms can be payed for out of our Flexible Spending Account, yet sanitary pads and tampons are excluded. W.T.F. America???

    Frankly, as a woman who has some murky genetic disorders looming in my future, I am flat-out scared of individualized health care. When I say, “I will move to Canada if McCain is elected,” I am not threatening this out of some petulant need to diss America – I am seriously looking for a way to grow old without going bankrupt by medical bills (which, again, is not a baseless fear – my parents went bankrupt over medical bills).

  2. Medical issues are the nation’s leading cause of bankrupcy. It’s a wonder why creditors don’t support universal healthcare. Visa and Mastercard could be unlikely allies for us on this issue. Mortgage lenders too.

  3. I’m often amazed at the barriers my friends and myself and my family face to medical care.

    We pay off ER bills at the rate of $10 or $50 a month, knowing it will be years before we’re paid off for whatever epic injury (broken bones, food poisoning that lasted 48 hours of vomiting, flu viruses run amok) occurred.

    I remember my mother’s often-hours-long conversations with insurance companies when I was small, when health care was taken for granted. The insurance comapny didn’t seem to want to cover anything, ever.

    I was shocked when I started receiving $400 bills for lab work whenever I had a routine exam. The insurance company just didn’t cover that, not one cent. At that time $400 was well-over a month’s rent and utilities; I cried for weeks.

    I see my grandparents scraping together every last penny for their health care, which grows increasingly complex with their age and failing health. Hearts just don’t work that long, and the crutches to prop them up are increasingly expensive.

    As for myself, I was honoured to have a medical practitioner who actually encouraged me to any means possible to prop up my immune system. He had just had biopsied exceedingly irregular cells and was willing to warn me that with good care, I could escape from further and worse damage.

    This is ugly, and it could only get worse before it ever gets better.

  4. It is getting worse. My employer has droppped my current insurance company for next year and my new “best” coverage option only pays partial costs.

    I was also recently turned down by my current insurance company for several tests my doctor thinks I need. They are too expensive for me to pay for on my own.

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