Poll Should women pay more for health insurance? (358 votes)
Here's an interesting ethical question for you. If women take more out of the health care system than men do, but they both pay the same amount in insurance premiums, would it be accurate to call that gender equality?
Inspired by this lovely piece of completely one-sided "journalism" over at Yahoo:
The comments section is great, though. Many people--including more than a few women--agree that women should pay more. They also raise a good point about the gender discrimination when it comes to women paying less for car insurance, and how nobody in our government seems to care about that.
If women are statistically safer drivers, they SHOULD pay less for car insurance. That makes perfect sense, and it's the way insurance works. If you are less likely to need it, you are less likely to cost the system more than you put in, and you pay less money.
Anyhow, here are a couple of quotes from the doctor in question, who dared to suggest that people who statistically use their insurance more should actually pay more.
“We only have the prostate. Women have the breasts, they have the ovaries, they have the uterus, they get checked in every part.
"Look, it's not bias, I'm not saying this as a man," he said. "They go through a lot of preventive screenings, they give birth, they have the whole mammogram, the Pap smear. Guys, we don't like to go to doctors, right? Seventy percent of health care decisions are made by women. In my own practice, I see it's the women who bring the guys, who say, 'Go get screened.' Otherwise, we would never go."
And of course, at that point, all sorts of feminists and various women's interest groups cried fowl. And some people have suggested that the fact that women seek out preventative care certainly must make them LESS expensive to insurance companies than men. But let's look at that argument.
The thing is, I often hear that feminism views gender inequality as a systemic problem. I hear the argument that feminists don't view males as evil men twirling their mustaches and secretly piloting how they can continue to oppress women. And I believe that argument, and I feel that the vast majority of feminists do not view men in that way.
But the thing is, with that said, we're left with one of two possibilities.
1) There are men who run health insurance companies. These men structure their entire business around the concept of knowing who is more likely to pay into the system, and who is more likely to take more from the system. These men see hard data on all of their customers, and use that data to determine insurance premiums. These men have determined that overall, women take more from the system than men. Because of this, they charge women higher health care premiums than men.
2) There are men who run health insurance companies. These are evil men twirling their mustaches and secretly piloting how they can continue to oppress women.
So instead, we're left with the simple non-sexist fact that women really do cost health insurance companies more than men. The question is, do you believe that is fair?
And again, if women take more out of the health care system than men do, but they both pay the same amount in insurance premiums, would it be accurate to call that gender equality?
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