Comments on: Another reason to back single-payer UHC: gender equality

By: HCR, the Stupak amendment, and the complex reality of abortion : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:06:08 +0000

[...] kinds of women, whether or not they’re happy, sad, or ambivalent about their pregnancies. Women’s bodies are apparently just too complicated, disgusting, and leaky, with all of their alluring and yet disturbing apertures that blur the boundaries between the self [...]

By: Feminist Law Professors » Blog Archive » Women Pay A Lot More Than Men For Health Insurance, Even When Childbirth Isn’t Covered.

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:18:07 +0000

[...] has a post addressing this here, and she in turn links to this post at Anglachel’s [...]

By: Sisyphus

Sisyphus — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:33:46 +0000

Ugh! Reminds me of back when Bush (may he get boils between his toes) released some health thing that defined all women of childbearing age as “pre-pregnant”! I forget which document it was, but it had me pissed off for weeks.

OTOH, I Loooove teaching about the abject female body and freaking all my students out! I don’t know why I find it so fun. One of my novelists on the syllabus quotes Odo of Cluny, so I got to have fun explaining all that, heh.

By: Notorious Ph.D.

Notorious Ph.D. — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:08:00 +0000

I went to the article, and this quote got to me:

“In general, insurers say, they charge women more than men of the same age because claims experience shows that women use more health care services. They are more likely to visit doctors, to get regular checkups, to take prescription medications and to have certain chronic illnesses.”

Except for the last, these things that women do are preventative care. Which *saves* money.

Capitalist running dogs.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:04:38 +0000

Clearly, they’re just working from the “cooties” variables, Indyanna and nicole! Don’tcha love it that most insurance companies will cover Viagra for men, but not birth control devices and pills for women?

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:55:46 +0000

Wow, that’s no *recent* Times article; it’s on the still unread front page of my paper today. This blog’s so fast the analysis is available before the text is read!

Anybody who goes to a gym and sees a thousand Flomax (r) ads on the flatscreen monitors–showing pained ol’ boyz jumping out of jalopies, golf carts, and even bass boats, and hip-hopping across the fields in search of the nearest, um, latrine–knows that urinary complications that WILL require treatment with medication or, my god, surgery?, are a one hundred percent probable outcome of being a guy and not getting run over by a bus by the age of 55 at the latest. I wonder who comes up with the variables that they factor into these actuarial tables, anyway?

By: nicole

nicole — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:54:18 +0000

Yes, I was incredibly annoyed when my employer explained that our insurance rates went through the roof due to the young women they had added to the staff because we *could* become pregnant and are of “child bearing age”. I’m easily the healthiest person on my staff and go to the doctor once a year for the yearly exam. My partner however didn’t cause his employer’s insurance premiums to go up although it is likely that if we did have children they would go under his plan…
Further, when I was a student and paying for an individual health plan (to the tune of $120 per month) not only was my birth control not covered, my plan also didn’t cover pregnancy. WTF sense does that make? It frankly wasn’t worth the money to me.