Last week, it was pointed out that in some states, our so-called health insurance companies are allowed to consider domestic violence a pre-existing condition. As Think Progress points out, having had a cesarian section can also be considered a pre-existing condition. Never mind that the U.S. has a sky rocketing c-section rate and that said c-sections are often performed for reasons other than because of medical necessity, such as soaring malpractice insurance rates.
If that doesn’t make you fume, check out Anthem’s explanation as to why c-sections are a pre-existing condition:
“The point of insurance is to insure against catastrophic care costs. That’s what you’re trying to aggregate and pool for such things as heart attacks and cancer,” said an Anthem Blue Cross spokesman. “Having a child is a matter of choice. Dealing with an adult onset illness, such as diabetes, heart disease breast or prostate cancer, is not a matter of choice.”
OH NO! ! It looks like we’re being accused of making reproductive choices again!
On the one hand you’ve got the faux family values folks telling us that we are baby killers if we exercise the right to end a pregnancy and we also have the insurance companies sticking us with the risk of going bankrupt if we have a c-section. Some choice.
And women are bearing all of the financial risk why? And what about pregnancies where the mother would have preferred to get an abortion and couldn’t? And what about pregnancies that are because the parents didn’t understand about contraception because they attended a school with abstinence only sex ed? Does this spokesperson comprehend that the “choice” to have children is how the human species propagates?
This isn’t about choice. It is first of all about insurance companies being out to insure one thing only–their profits, at the expense of the health of the citizens of this nation and secondly that there are not adequate laws protecting women from misogynist profiteering that violate their human rights. Full stop. Enough. We need single payer universal healthcare now and we need to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and CEDAW to insure that these horrifying practices end immediately.
This Sunday evening, September 18, Feminist Peace Network Director Lucinda Marshall will be interviewed on A World Of Progress Radio in a segment devoted to health care issues. Marshall will talk about her experience trying to transfer an individual health insurance policy from one state to another and how the problems faced by individual policy holders with pre-existing conditions are not currently being addressed adequately by health care reform. This issue hits women particularly hard since they are less likely to be covered by an employer’s policy.
