National Women’s Law Center just launched a campaign to this effect. It’s worth signing up and showing your support:

http://www.awomanisnotapreexistingcondition.com/

Thanks Jason!

I’ve been posting about “female” being a pre-existing condition, too.

Thanks for this post!

I signed, included a note and tweeted about it, too.

Thanks for the link!

The insurance companies should just get it over with and declare life a pre-existing condition.

It kind of makes you wonder if there are any women working as the rule-makers at these insurance companies.

Life, breathing, same thing, but we are approaching that point it seems.

Peterr, I’m not sure it would make any difference if there were. American employers, as a group, are still relatively hostile to women and are especially hostile with regard to dealing with family needs. Employers want workers and staff who are cogs — easily replaceable, hardy, and unproblematic. Women are complex, have complex connections, and come complete with a totally different set of physical, health, family and worklife issues that employers do not want to have to deal with. For all the ‘we are family friendly’ stuff that has been pumped out over the past 30 years, there are damn few companies which are really family friendly, and who are committed to making worklife actually work for women. When the general employer and employment culture is still relatively hostile to women, it becomes very easy for insurance companies to victimize women.

Sheesh. How did I miss that? GMTA and all that.

Agreed — which is why I said “as rule-makers” in my comment.

Unless and until women’s voices are heard and respected in the workplace, not merely tolerated, these kinds of policies will continue.

It’s like the exchange between Jon Kyle and Debbie Stabenow:

“I don’t need maternity care,” Kyl said. “So requiring that on my insurance policy is something that I don’t need and will make the policy more expensive.”

Stabenow interrupted: “I think your mom probably did.”

As long as the Kyl’s of the world set the rules, the mothers will suffer.

“The congressman who said GOP health care plans were for people to “die quickly” is ready to name names. Of dead people.

In a speech on the House floor this afternoon, Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., announced a new Website –www.namesofthedead.com — for people to share stories of loved ones who died because of inadequate health insurance. ”

http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/10/graysons-next-move-namesofthedeadcom.html

To further that along… we need to encourage more girls and young women to pursue math seriously.

As long as men have more control over the numbers that seem to rule so many things, they will write more of the rules, and the pay gap will continue. At least, that’s my theory. I’m hoping to see it proved. (And I do encourage girls to pursue math whenever I get a chance and it’s appropriate.)

Undeserved snark deleted.

I know what you mean. Same thoughts.

It kind of makes you wonder if there are any women working as the rule-makers at these insurance companies.

Discrimination under the color of law is illegal! Insurance is predicated on discrimination. State regulated health insurers, for profit or tax exempt and with anti trust exemptions, segregate risk, using the concept of pre-existing conditions, as a basis for discrimination, to profit.

Corporate health insurers “use” discrimination to deny people medical protection of their lives as slave-owners and segregationist, denied slaves and American citizens “protection of law, freedom and Liberty, to protect the business interests of slave owners and segregationist, who fought change because it cost “THEM” to much! Corporate sum in corporate crime rape Americans all the time, akin to the behavior of a King?

Protect corporations while Americans die! Pretty fucked up folks, kind of like protecting the tobacco industry, for which we all now pay the cost of the death and disease inflicted on America by legalized drug dealers who raped America of billions of dollars by instilling a need for a death product!!! History repeats all the time, but we learn little as a brainwashed nation!

I signed, thanks for the link, Jason.