FOUL PLAY

Insurance company mistreatment

“Please keep up the good work with the marketing reps of not trying to sign up pregnant women.”

That from a 2001 e-mail sent by Amerigroup Illinois director of medical management to company managers.

Five years later, a federal jury awarded $48 million in damages against the insurer and its parent company for discriminating against people with health conditions and pregnant women enrolled in the federal Medicaid program.

Women eligible for employer insurance are protected by federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on gender. But states regulate the individual insurance market and most states do not protect women against such discrimination.

Data from insurance companies and online brokers of the individual insurance market shows that women pay much more than men of the same age for individual insurance policies providing identical coverage—if they can get coverage at all.

An editorial in The New York Times adds that the study also “found that in some states insurers are allowed to reject applicants for reasons that effectively exclude many women, such as having had a Caesarean section or surviving domestic violence, and that the vast majority of individual policies don’t cover maternity care.”

The New York Times editorial ends with a call for an end of these practices:

“Insurance companies long ago stopped charging premiums based on race, even though they offered similar actuarial arguments. There are laws against using gender to set rates in employer-based health insurance. Surely it is time to eliminate gender-based premiums in the individual health insurance market as well. Otherwise women, who typically earn less than men, may find themselves priced out of adequate health coverage.”

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