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Glass ceiling on good health

Posted by: Ella Hushagen on May 22, 2009

While disparities in pay and professional opportunities between men and women have been widely publicized, we have paid less attention to the insidious gender inequality in access to affordable, high-quality health care in the U.S. The White House, however, recognizes that health reform presents an opportunity to tackle this problem.

A new report by the Department of Health and Human Services announces that

Comprehensive health care reform is needed to level the playing field, and make health care accessible and affordable for all women.

The report points to data that indicate women are vastly underserved by our current system:

• Twenty-one million women and girls went without health insurance in 2007.

• Less than half of women have the option of obtaining employer-based coverage on their own.

• Holding other factors constant, a 22-year-old woman can be charged one and a half times the premium of a 22-year-old man.

• Nearly one-third of women aged 50 to 64 are in households that have spent more than 10% of their income on health care, compared with one quarter of men of similar age.

Women who lack access to employer-based health coverage are unlikely to find health insurance in the individual market that meets their needs. In the majority of states, private insurers can deny applicants based on opaque underwriting criteria, and they can charge women more than men based on gender alone. This means that many women either can't get or can't afford individual market coverage. According to the report,

Of the 8 million middle-income non-elderly women who do not have employer-sponsored coverage, more than half remain uninsured and only a fifth obtain insurance through the individual market.

And women who are able to obtain individual health insurance may find that it doesn't cover crucial benefits. A 2008 report by the National Women's Law Center found that most individual policies don't cover pregnancy or childbirth.

A recent issue brief released by the Commonwealth Fund found that,

In 2007, more than half (52%) of women reported problems accessing needed care because of cost and 45 percent of women accrued medical debt or reported problems with medical bills.

Policymakers must repair the health care system with an eye toward better serving women. Gender equality and health care equality go hand in hand.