It sounds vaguely like communist China: if you want healthcare coverage, get sterilized.
What if you or your wife or your daughter had a C section and then were told you couldn’t get health insurance unless you got sterilized? That’s what happened to Peggy Robertson when she tried to buy coverage through UnitedHealthcare’s Golden Rule insurance. How would United Healthcare’s CEO feel if an insurance company bureaucrat told his loved ones to get sterilized? Maybe he subscribes to that other Golden Rule.... He who has the gold makes the rules.
Peggy Robertson ended up choosing not to enroll with Golden Rule. She already had individual coverage, but was trying to find a more affordable plan. Finding out that the only way to make the plan affordable would be to get sterilized nixed the deal. In one respect, Ms. Robertson was lucky, she wasn't already trapped into a Golden Rule policy. Too bad for all the women enrolled in the plan who have had to have C-sections. They're out of luck.
Golden Rule, by the way, isn't new to the healthcare reform debate. Remember back in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was pushing health savings accounts as the panacea for the healthcare mess? Turns out, health savings plans were the dreamchild of a guy named J. Patrick Rooney, who at the time was chairman of Golden Rule. Which, at the time, had a special insurance plan they were trying to sell exclusively to people who had health savings accounts.
The proposal, already approved by the House, would create tax incentives for people to set up medical savings accounts to pay health care expenses. The company, the Golden Rule Insurance Company, sells a special type of health insurance that would have to be purchased by people with such tax-free accounts.
The insurance has high deductibles and relatively low premiums but would pay medical bills exceeding the amount for which the patient was responsible -- $1,500 a year for an individual and $3,000 for a family, under the House bill. The proposal would allow people to put pretax dollars into the medical savings accounts to pay their deductibles....
In an interview, [Mr. Rooney] said that he and Golden Rule employees had given $1.1 million to the Republican National Committee and Republican candidates for Congress since January 1993. Common Cause, the public affairs lobby, said that Mr. Rooney and John M. Whelan, Golden Rule's president, had given more than $117,000 to Gopac, the political action committee that helped Mr. Gingrich take control of the House.
Ah, the more things change....