For the next two years, before the Affordable Care Act makes it illegal, health insurers are getting as much money as they can out of their female customers in premiums, regardless of how much they have to pay out in services. Gender rating, that is the ubiquitous practice of setting higher premiums for women than men, will be a thing of the past beginning in 2014, but insurers in states that haven't already outlawed or limited the practice are doing little to prepare for the change, reports the New York Times' Robert Pear, writing about a new study from the National Women’s Law Center.
For a popular Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in Chicago, a 30-year-old woman pays $375 a month, which is 31 percent more than what a man of the same age pays for the same coverage, according to eHealthInsurance.com, a leading online source of health insurance. [...]
Insurers said they charged women more than men because claims showed that women ages 19 to 55 tended to use more health care services.[...]
But Marcia D. Greenberger, a president of the National Women’s Law Center, said the justification was “highly questionable” because the disparities varied greatly from one insurer to another.
“In Arkansas, for example,” Ms. Greenberger said, “one health plan charges 25-year-old women 81 percent more than men, while a similar plan in the same state charges women only 10 percent more.” [...]
In Louisville, Ky., according to eHealthInsurance.com, a 40-year-old nonsmoking woman pays $196 a month for a HumanaOne policy. That is 53 percent more than the $128 premium paid for the same coverage by a nonsmoking man of the same age. In addition, the nonsmoking woman pays 14 percent more than the $172 premium charged to a man of the same age who has used tobacco in the past year.
But wait, you might say, women have babies and that costs a lot of money. But that's not the case, as Pear explains. Maternity coverage is generally provided in insurance riders, expensive optional plans that women get to pay even more for. Pear gives the example of a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in Springfield, Illinois, where a 30-year-old woman would $278 a month for basic insurance, and would have to pay an additional $270/month for maternity coverage.
One of the questions for regulators at the state and federal level is how to deal with the equalization in premium rates the insurance companies will implement when the law goes into effect. In other words, how will regulators ensure that costs of premiums for women are decreased, rather than costs for men raised to meet the outrageous level women have been paying. The good news is that the more direct competition insurers will get because of the health exchanges might encourage insurers to narrow the gap by bringing premium rates somewhere in the middle.
But this study does bring into better perspective one controversy: Given how much more women pay for insurance than men, we damn well should have free birth control, one of the least expensive prescription drugs on the market.