From the Rocky Mountain News:
A bill that would end the practice of charging women more than men for health insurance is headed to a summertime interim committee rather than a fight on the floor.
Rep. Sue Schafer, D-Wheat Ridge, said she plans to amend her House Bill 1224 and get a bipartisan committee to look at it so that she can get across-the-board agreement on the measure. She anticipates introducing whatever comes out of the task force when the General Assembly convenes next year.
Younger and middle-aged women pay as much as 45 percent more for health-care coverage because of actuarial assessments that anticipate all women will become pregnant at some point in their lives and use their insurance to pay for it. Schafer hopes that Colorado, like 12 others states, will ban an applicant’s gender as a factor in setting insurance rates.
“I really want to work with the insurance industry and not make it an adversarial relationship,” she said about her bill.
Here’s my question: Why don’t insurance companies have optional coverages? Some women do not plan to get pregnant and wouldn’t want to pay the extra premium. Some women who don’t plan to get pregnant might want the coverage anyway. Some not. Prohibiting insurance companies from charging higher premiums will make premiums higher for men. If an insurance company wants to price their products this way, fine. But politicians have absolutely no right to tell a business what kind of a product they must sell.
