I wonder how long this has been the case (since the beginning?) and why it has taken so long for this to surface? Well I guess we don't have to think about McCain's health plan anymore...

http://blog.justthrive.com

While this certainly appears "discriminatory" at first glance, it's no more so than the well-known fact that men pay higher premiums than women for exactly the same auto insurance.  The reason for these discrepancies?  Men are more likely to file auto insurance claims and women are more likely to file health insurance claims.

either way it's total crap.

Please stop the unfounded claims of gender discrimination.  Women cost health insurers more money than men.  The data is clear.   Its been looked at over and over by every insurer.  If you want to ban the use of experience data in setting insurance premiums, then women need to be prepared to pay more for life insurance and auto insurance, because men are rated up on those policies.    Group health policies with family coverage will also increase.  Is that what we want?  

Also, because I am older, I pay more for many forms of insurance than do younger people.  I am being discriminated against based on my age.   Where is the outrage?

In CT small group insurance market females are charged much more than males, same reason.  Woman are actuarily more expensive.  And they have babies.

FYI: Individual plans generally don't cover maternity as any illness, BUT they do cover pregnancy-related complications.  Which are hugely expensive.  So a female with no maternity coverage could end up costing $100k+ for one claim.  

Its ugly, but the truth.  But look at the states with "guaranteed" health coverage.  $1000+ per month for a single person, HMO coverage.  Thats even uglier.  

I do notice that huge differnce, since I buy my own Helht Ins.

I totally disagree on women go to doctor more than men or take more prescripcions, thats BS. As everything on life we most to be treate IQUAL !!!!!!!

ToughMoneyLove, if you're covered by any group health insurance, it's the young ones who are paying for you, not the other way around.  You get old and creaky, you cost more.  Fact of life.

But if Marcia Greenberger is correct that premium variation "could not possibly be justified" by actuarial principles, the issue is one of discrimination.  In fact, given the lack of transparency into the insurance market, the incredible variation in premiums for identical customers, and the for-profit nature of the business, I don't know why we'd be surprised if some insurance companies increase their prices because the uninsured are willing to pay them.

Frankly, though, whatever the real risk, the underlying issue is one of fairness.  There's something you can do about car insurance (stop driving, for instance), but you cannot help sometimes getting sick.  Medical treatment, like public schooling, is a general good: a healthy population is profitable for a country.  It is also one of the ethical obligations in many religions to care for the sick as well as the old or the orphan.  Given this, I think we tend to recoil from the hard, cold, actuarial facts of health care expense.  

It's not that we don't know that we pay more for risk in the insurance world.  It's that confronting the fact that some people are terribly vulnerable to illness based on nothing more than their gender, age, or ethnicity offends something in us.  The idea that a poor kid in DC might die because he knew that his mom couldn't afford a trip to the dentist (to treat an abscess that eventually burst into a fatal blood infection) is horrifying to all of us, when our own children are wearing thousands of dollars of braces.  Yet that happened just a year or two ago.  Ultimately, we want a country which everyone has equal access to affordable health care, but are unwilling to accept that such a country isn't going to exist while medical insurance is a patchwork of privately-funded for-profit companies.

Is the solution to nationalize health care?  I don't see any other way out of the actuarial trap for the less fortunate.  As access to employer-provided health care continues to diminish, something is going to have to change.  The insurance-based model isn't working well anymore, for doctors or patients.  The high cost of medical malpractice insurance is making it harder and harder for doctors to accept patients under cheaper health plans and is making it more expensive for all of us to be treated.  Medical research costs a fortune, and that cost is passed on to all of us in medicine and equipment costs.  The uninsured can't afford routine care and therefore end up costing more in emergency care (as well as personal suffering.)  It's a lot cheaper to get regular diabetes screenings than to have a foot amputated . . . but if you can't afford the first, you may be stuck.

At some point, the only people who will be able to afford insurance are the healthy.  That may make perfect business sense for the insurance companies, but it must offend our own sense of fairness, and it would certainly be a great hardship to our economy to lose the productivity of those suffering from chronic or serious illnesses.  Various racial and ethnic backgrounds translate to increased risk for diabetes, certain cancers, and other problems.  Does that mean that we condemn people to substandard care and early death because of their race?  Women have babies and sometimes complications.  Does this mean they shouldn't receive health care, because it's too expensive, or that they should bear the financial burden themselves?  No--the large-scale economic benefit of a sustained birth rate in the US is too valuable to all of us.

Like a lot of us, I'm a bit freaked out by the idea of nationalized or part-nationalized health care.  But I can't see a better option.

it's disappointing, but this country is built on capitalism and so ANYTHING is only done to the extent it makes excellent profit. as a result, those less fortunate suffer. and now, even those fortunate suffer.

i have insurance through my company, which i'm surprised isn't actually common.

I believe greed is all that matters when these decisions are made by the insurance companies.  My husband has to pay alot more to cover me, but it would be less if he had several children.  I would think children are just as big of a risk as a spouse, especially as i am past the child bearing years.  Something is basicly wrong and it is time to come up with a better way of handling this issue..

The original author’s opinion that higher medical insurance premiums cannot be justified by actuarial facts is simply wrong.  Medical expenditure and insurance coverage data by gender is readily available through the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey maintained by the federal government.  Women incur higher medical expenses than men, and women are more likely to have medical insurance coverage than men.  If medical insurance for women is mispriced it represents a tremendously profitable business opportunity for someone (a consortium of female business owners for example) to offer more “accurate” and “reasonable” pricing.  I’ll consider caring about this issue as soon as women die as often as men on the job, in combat, from suicide, from homicide, represent an equal share of the homeless and suicides, pay the same rates as men for auto and life insurance, and men have an equal life expectancy to women.  Demanding equality in any area where men seem to have it better than women while turning a blind eye to equality in areas where men clearly do not have it better than women is either ignorant or sexist.  I’ll support the idea that women should be 50% of Fortune 500 CEOs or 50% of political leaders when women support the idea that 50% of any disadvantaged category, whether that category contains two people or two million people, should be women as well.