Health insurers are legally allowed to consider gender in the health insurance market, allowing insurers to charge women more than men. The National Women’s Law Center conducted a study last year that highlights health insurance gender disparity. The NWLC study found that 95 percent of insurance companies charge women more than men for the same coverage for individual policies. For 60 percent of plans, a 40-year-old female who doesn’t smoke will pay more for her policy than a 40-year-old male who does smoke.

Health insurance companies blame the disparity on reproductive issue costs. Yet the study found that some 25-year-old women are charged up to 84 percent more than men of the same age for health plans (in the individual market) that exclude maternity coverage. And, if you happen to have maternity coverage and a child by cesarean section (approximately one-third of CA women do), then you can be denied health insurance if you decided to switch policies because ‘c-sections’ are deemed a pre-existing condition.

Group policy holders are not off the hook. Gender rating of premiums also occurs in group plans provided by employers. Insurance companies in most states are allowed to charge a business more for coverage of its female employees. Those with a predominantly female workforce, like firms that employ home health aides, often get hit with superhigh costs that get passed on to employees in the form of higher contributions. Or these companies may buy plans that cover less or offer no coverage at all.

Before the recession hit in 2008, over one-in-five CA women were uninsured. It’s estimated that in the past two years almost one million Californians have lost their medical coverage, so common sense tells one that the number of women that are uninsured has dramatically increased.

This is a complicated problem with many specific issues, however, by addressing the broad issue of gender ratings, the system will be able to ‘re-boot’ itself as other discriminatory practices are impacted and, as a result, stopped.