Treating Domestic Violence as a Preexisting Condition is Only One Example of the Rampant Sexism in the Healthcare Debate | BuzzFlash.org

Treating Domestic Violence as a Preexisting Condition is Only One Example of the Rampant Sexism in the Healthcare Debate | BuzzFlash.org

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The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is bringing attention to the fact that it is legal in eight states and the District of Columbia for insurance companies to deny coverage due to previous instances of domestic violence. This is not merely a legalistic exercise, either: SEIU also notes that half of the largest insurers have used domestic violence as a reason to limit and/or deny care to customers in the past.

When you remove the public relations element, it makes sense that insurance companies would do this to minimize risk. After all, 35 percent of all calls to emergency rooms are related to domestic violence, and 37 percent of women making emergency room visits do so because of abuse from their current or former partner. Surely it gets expensive.

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The information that the SEIU cites on domestic violence as preexisting condition comes from a study published last fall by the National Women's Law Center, which illustrated that there are plenty more ways in which private insurance companies discriminate against women (because around 85 percent of victims of domestic violence are women according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, I don't consider it a stretch to say that denying such victims insurance coverage amounts to sexual discrimination).

But the study also found that individual insurance is more expensive for women due to the practice of "gender rating," even though women are generally healthier -- and engage in more cost-saving preventative care -- than men. Also, they found affordable maternal health insurance is notoriously difficult to obtain, leading this cartoonist to quip that just "being a woman" a preexisting condition.

The realities of the job market for women also means fair reform of health insurance may effect women more than men. Women are more likely to work part-time and inundervalued "pink collar" industries, both of which commonly lack healthcare insurance coverage. Furthermore, though there's no broad scientific data on this, at least twostudies I found confirmed my suspicion that women tend to work at smaller companies, which routinely have less secure health insurance profiles on the whole due to their limited bargaining power.

Even before they enter the job market, women are discriminated against in access to affordable healthcare. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 gave drug companies an economic incentive to stop offering birth control pills to colleges and other low-cost providers at a discount, meaning that a month's worth of pills that once cost from $3 to $10 skyrocketed to somewhere between $30 and $50. ...