UNFAIR: 'Gender rating' must go

A woman who purchases her own health insurance in Idaho can count on paying more than a man for the same coverage, due to a discriminatory practice called “gender rating.” For many, this can put affordable, comprehensive coverage out of reach, leaving them uninsured or underinsured. The health-care law will ban such practices once fully implemented, but until then it remains a widespread problem.

In Idaho, 100 percent of the best-selling individual health insurance plans practice gender rating and 32 percent exclude maternity coverage. For example, one plan charges a 40-year-old woman $722 more in annual premiums than a 40-year-old man for the same coverage; another charges $684 more.

Nationwide, the effect of these discrepancies can be staggering. New analysis by the National Women’s Law Center finds that gender rating costs U.S. women approximately $1 billion a year.

Insurance companies, despite being aware of the problem, have not voluntarily taken steps to eliminate it. That’s why the health-care law addresses gender rating in Idaho and nationwide. The provisions rolling out in 2014 will prohibit it in the individual insurance market, require all plans on the individual market to provide maternity coverage and prohibit sex discrimination in health plans from insurance companies that receive federal funds.

The practice of gender rating is not going away by itself. This national problem demands a national solution and we have one in the health-care law.

MARCIA D. GREENBERGER

Co-President

National Women’s Law Center

Washington, D.C.