Let's End Discriminatory Gender Rating

Heath insurance companies often use something called "gender rating" to allow them to charge one gender more than the other. This results in women of childbearing years paying more for their health insurance than their male counterparts in the same age range. It also means that older men pay more for their health coverage than do older women. This discriminatory practice should be outlawed. Indeed, provisions to abolish gender rating are included in some of the health care reform bills currently being debated in Washington.

But let´s not stop there. This ban should be applied to all forms of insurance, not just health care coverage. For example, there is no good reason why gender should be taken into consideration when calculating life insurance or automobile insurance premiums. That amounts to nothing more than gender profiling, which is basically the same as gender rating in health insurance, and has the moral equivalency to racial profiling.

Sure, men on average don´t live as long as women and are more likely to have traffic violations than they. But that doesn´t mean that I will not live as long as the average woman or drive any less safely than most women do. Likewise, just because women are more likely than men to give birth doesn´t mean that any individual woman will necessarily bear children. Any insurance profiling or rating should be done on a case-by-case basis, based on individual behavior and circumstances – not things like gender or race.