Subject: [big campaign] Elizabeth Edwards on the Inequitable Individual Market
From: "Adam Jentleson (CAPAF)" <[email-masked]>
To: "big campaign" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:25:05 -0400
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

The latest from Elizabeth is up now on the Wonk Room.

http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/06/24/elizabeth-individual-market
/

Elizabeth Edwards On The Inequitable Individual Market
<http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/06/24/elizabeth-individual-marke
t/> 

Our guest blogger is Elizabeth Edwards, a Senior Fellow
<http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/04/10/elizabeth-edwards-wonk-roo
m/>  at the Center for American Progress and wife of former Presidential
candidate John Edwards.

David Lazarus, in Sunday's Los Angeles Times, brought us a fresh
reminder of the challenges posed by preexisting conditions
<http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus22-2008jun22,0,24096.colum
n>  by raising a new one - being a woman.

Senator John McCain's health plan is based on the idea that everyone
should be on their own to buy their health insurance on the individual
market. And it's an approach fundamentally at odds with the point of
health insurance: that we share risks. People with preexisting
conditions, like McCain and myself, would pay much more for health
insurance under his health plan, if we could get coverage at all.

Insurance companies have all sorts of characteristics they look at in
order to increase premiums
<http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/04/21/elizabeth-responds-cheap-s
hot/> , such as preexisting conditions, occupation, age, and residence.
But I hadn't realized that the McCain plan would enable insurers to
"rate-up" my insurance bill for not only my status as a breast cancer
patient, but also my gender.

The ability to become pregnant has long been understood as an excuse to
charge women more for health insurance (because, of course, men have
nothing to do with that particular health condition). But what makes the
Lazarus column interesting is that he tells us that insurers are
charging women higher premiums even if pregnancy benefits are excluded.
Blue Shield of California (Blue Shield) is now charging woman more in
the individual market because:

	"Our egghead actuaries crunched the numbers based on all the
data we have about healthcare," explained Tom Epstein, a Blue Shield
spokesman.

That doesn't really inspire a sense of fairness. Doctors recommend that
women have mammograms and other preventative screenings. Is Blue Shield
really trying to discourage health screenings? Do they think that women
are more accident prone? Whatever their reasoning, one thing is clear -
they don't want to enroll too many women:

	"We don't want to get a disproportionate share of high-risk
people," added Epstein. As Lazarus noted, "by 'high risk people," what
he means is 'women.'"

Blue Shield, a not-for-profit company, says they are just following the
trend of for-profit insurers in California (at least two competitors
already adjust premiums based on gender). Blue Shield exists in a
competitive market that rewards insurers for doing the wrong things. In
that sense, it isn't fair to pick on Blue Shield in particular,
especially since Blue Shield's CEO speaks constructively on health
reform <http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/3/667>
.

The point is that the insurers have given us just another example about
how the individual market is fundamentally broken. Embracing it as the
solution to our health crisis - as the McCain plan proposes to - will
only make matters worse.

-----
Adam Jentleson
Communications and Outreach Director
The Hyde Park Project, Center for American Progress Action Fund
202-247-8614

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