Are you uninsurable?
Amanda Terkel in ThinkProgress:
This week, ThinkProgress pointed out that women often face extra hurdles in obtaining health care on the individual market since some insurers refuse to cover maternity care, disqualify women who have had a Caesarean-section pregnancy, or consider domestic violence a pre-existing condition. Yesterday in a speech, First Lady Michelle Obama addressed these disparities:
Women are affected because, as we heard, in many states, insurance companies can still discriminate because of gender. And this is still shocking to me. These are the kind of facts that still wake me up at night; that women in this country have been denied coverage because of preexisting conditions like having a C-section or having had a baby. In some states, it is still legal to deny a woman coverage because she’s been the victim of domestic violence.
And a recent study showed that 25-year-old women are charged up to 45 percent more for insurance than 25-year-old men for the exact same coverage. And as the age goes up, you get to 40, that disparity increases to 48 percent — 48 percent difference for women for the exact same coverage in this country.
Consumer Watchdog has released internal industry “underwriting” guidelines showing some other “pre-existing conditions” that insurers have used to either deny people outright or charge exorbitant fees for coverage:
Isn’t Lamasil available OTC? The question then becomes, can I get it OTC for less than the cost of the co-pay for the Rx? Also, Allegra and Nexium are covered under my health insurance plan. Is it possible that they are covered under some plans if-and-only-if some cheaper alternative/generic fails to provide relief, or if your doctor makes a specific request? I think that is an aspect of my plan, too.
While I do want to see a single-payer, and would settle for a national public option, I think it is dangerous to present a chart that would seem to speak for the multitudes of Rx plans across the country. When a statement is so broad that it cannot possibly be accurate, it damages our credibility as supporters of health care reform.
The complexity of the reform question is so ignored in the general media that it is little wonder that so many “moran”ic signs are displayed at rallies. There was a great post on Kos by Laura Clawson on 9.18.09 that spoke to the wide variety of unacknowledged issues the protesters yip about. Another good response to the protesters came from NPR on a program about Twitter on Saturday (9.19.09) from a listener who said that it was a good thing public library systems already existed, because she could just imagine trying to get THAT past congress now!
And thanks for this blog. It is a daily pleasure for me.
bill bush
20 September 2009 at 12:43 pm