I Heard it Downtown

I already posted that New York Times story on facebook, but I didn’t really think about the other side of the coin. Women pay higher health care premiums than men because women take on greater risks. This is primarily due to the fact that women get pregnant, but also because women are more health concious than men and make greater efforts to see the doctor. So, in a sense, an entire class of citizens (a majority of the country) is being discriminated against because they are making wise decisions. That’s just stupid, but it’s legal. There is no equivalent to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate discrimination in insurance.

But take a step back. Comprehend the whole picture. Women also get paid less for doing the same work as men. On average, for every dollar a man earns, a woman makes twenty-three cents less. When race is factored the disparity is even worse.

So women, who make less money than men, have to pay more for health care. Single mothers make less money than married husbands with children, and, that’s right, they have to pay more money for health insurance. Covering their children is probably no less costly (it may even be cheaper due to Medicaid), but there’s a hidden risk here. Children are more susceptible to illness if their parents are uninsured.

Truthfully, most places in the world are sexist. I don’t think Americans are any more or less sexist than the French or British, and in terms of public policy, women can find certain advantages here they can’t find in many other countries (the U.S. has relatively liberal abortion laws, for example, like Canada and France but unlike the UK and Germany). The problem is we have a system that incentivizes sexism. Gender and sex issues haven’t factored into the discussion of the financial crisis thus far, but when Alan Greenspan confessed that he had been wrong to believe that the self-interest of groups would yield desirable outcomes in our economy, he’s stating something appears totally obvious when you look at how our system discriminates against women. Insurance companies discriminate against women because they have an interesting in doing so: women carry bigger risks simply for being women.

There’s a solution to this problem: make it illegal. That requires more regulation. Conservatives will wine. And here is where I fly off the cuff. I don’t get that. I just don’t understand why conservatives have for a century thought certain principles like federalism and unfettered free markets were loftier goals than Civil Rights and abolishing child labor. That makes no sense whatsoever. Conservatives want to privatize Social Security. Why? To give individuals (apparently) more control over their money. That’s just a principle, though. There’s no guarantee that society will be better off, and there’s no consideration of potentially loftier principles like social justice and equal opportunity.

But I digress. We’ve heard a lot of nonsense from the McCain campaign about how Obama wants to redistribute wealth. Well, so does McCain. If you’re president, you redistribute wealth. You’re taking other people’s money and spending it on somebody else. Obama wants to take a little bit more money from wealthy Americans and spend a lot on social services. McCain wants to reduce taxes, but there’ll still be taxes, and he’ll still be spending money impulsively on whatever enemy he feels the need to fight that particular week.

I’m not saying any of this to be particularly left-wing. This isn’t a left-right issue anywhere else. We have a psychology in the United States that has many admirable factors: our free speech laws are the most liberal in the world. Despite the NSA program and other recent surveillance activities, these are still nothing compared to what exists in other countries. We’re a society that strongly values the right to privacy. Personal, individual liberty is a good thing, but we need to learn that the unbridled free market does not always facilitate individual liberty. Is a woman really more free when she has to pay more for health care simply because she’s a woman? Please…

My solution is just have the government pay for everyone’s health care, but maybe that isn’t politically feasible or maybe there are actual problems in doing that. But can’t we all agree that regulating insurance companies so they at least ensure equity in their coverage is fair enough?