By Brigette Courtot, Senior Policy Analyst, National Women's Law Center

For most of their lives, women are charged more than men for health plans in the individual insurance market. This is a consequence of “gender rating,” the common insurance industry practice of using gender to decide how much to charge for health insurance.

A new NWLC report shows that at age 40, for instance, women are charged as much as 49% more than men for individual health plans. Consider this scenario: a 40-year-old man is charged $250 a month for health insurance, while his twin sister is charged $375 for the exact same plan. Over the course of a year, she’s paying $1,500 more than he is! Shocking, right?

But the truth is that the health insurance industry is rife with this sort of discrimination — and it gets worse. Imagine that our 40-year-old man is a regular smoker, while his twin sister steers clear of tobacco. Guess who pays more? (Hint: Abandon all sense of logic and reason before answering.)

Well, in most of the roughly 400 individual health insurance plans NWLC studied for our new report, a non-smoking woman is charged more for coverage, even when compared to a man of the same age who smokes. Yes, you heard that correctly: in the individual health insurance market, having ovaries could very well cost you more than having a pack a day. And the difference in premiums can be considerable — we identified best-selling health plans that charged a nonsmoking woman as much as 63% more than a man who smokes.

The point of our analysis is not to endorse health insurance premium rating based on smoking status; NWLC advocates community rating — i.e. where all health plan enrollees are charged the same premium regardless of gender, tobacco use, and other factors. But it is reasonable to think that in our current health insurance system, men engaging in a behavior with significant health risks would be charged higher premiums than their female peers who avoid such risks.

But reason doesn’t have much of a place in our current system. That’s why we need comprehensive health reform that includes strong insurance market rules prohibiting insurers from discriminating based on factors like gender and health status, regardless of whether they are selling coverage to an individual or to a group of any size.

The bill unveiled by Speaker Pelosi (H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act) is a momentous step in the right direction, towards health reform that meets women’s needs and ends unfair and discriminatory health insurance practices.

Cross-posted from Womenstake