"Free" Market Health Care Abandons Women

Forget fighting the abortion ban: "free" market health care has already declared women second-class citizens. The New York Times tells us that women who have delivered children by Caesarean section have a harder time getting health insurance. Some insurers won't pay for future C-sections; some charge such women higher premiums. Amazingly, the ironically named Golden Rule Insurance Company simply rejects applications altogether from women who've had C-sections:

When the Golden Rule Insurance Company rejected her application for health coverage last year, Peggy Robertson was mystified.

“It made no sense,” said Ms. Robertson, 39, who lives in Centennial, Colo. “I’m in perfect health.”

She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified [Denise Grady, "After Caesarean, Some See Higher Insurance Cost," New York Times, 2008.06.01].

Ms. Robertson was doing exactly what my free-market friends says she should do: shop around, look for the best price, keep costs down by consumer choice. But to have a choice, to qualify for coverage from Golden Rule, she would have had to get sterilized. Her mere act of applying for coverage may have hurt her, since insurers red-flag individuals who have been rejected by other companies.

So women get pregnant, sometimes have to undergo C-sections to bring their children into the world safe and healthy, and the free market says, "You're a financial liability; no insurance for you!" Or, as in South Dakota, the insurers smile their free market smiles and offer maternity coverage only at a much higher premium. Remind me: how is this system better than true universal health care? And how would Clinton/RomneyCare that relies on these same scheming private insurers have been any better?

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a somewhat related postscript: The stimulus checks are being credited with a 1% increase in retail sales in May. (But inflation also experienced its biggest jump in six months -- oops.) So the government can borrow $140 billion from our kids and claim credit for boosting the economy. So imagine the boost the economy would get if we switched to Kucinich/Canada-style universal single-payer not-for-profit health care. We spend over $2 trillion a year on health care. Dennis Kucinich, Bill Clinton, and others will tell you that 20% to 30% of private health care dollars go toward paperwork (not to mention pay for lawyers to figure out clever ways to deny coverage to paying customers). Let's be conservative and suppose true universal health care would save us just 10% a year on our national health care expenditures. That would still be $200 billion pumped back into our economy every year, not by deficit spending, but pure savings and sensible public policy.