How Health Insurance Discriminates Against Female-Heavy Business

By Marc Tracy
BizBox.Slate.com

Kaiser Health News has a new article detailing how woman-owned or -dominated small businesses tend to get hit particularly hard by high health care premiums. The reason is simple: women, particularly under 55, tend to require more health care than men of the same age, primarily due to maternal and infant care. If you think that means it's okay for women to have to pay more, then we suppose you're entitled. But we don't think that makes it okay, and we suspect more people agree with us than with you.

But even if you feel that way, there is simply no good argument for why so-called "gender rating" should apply to small businesses and not to large ones. You see, under current law, insurance companies are banned from gender rating among large-group markets. So if you have 51 employees, you're okay; if you have 50, you're out of luck. Of course, most of the legislation currently circulating on Capitol Hill would change that, and would establish that the small-group market be treated essentially the same as the large-group one. One more reason to hope for reform's success.