Today, April 28th, is Blog for Fair Pay Day. In recognition of this important day, our guest post by Lisa Codispoti, Senior Counsel for Health and Reproductive Rights, National Women’s Law Center, relates to health care and equal pay.

Between 2000 and 2006, health insurance premiums increased 87.5 percent—4 times more than wages. In addition to the burden of inflated health care costs, women are still paid only 78 cents for every dollar earned by men—with women of color earning even less. In a world where women are earning significantly less than men for comparable work, how can they also afford health care?

Pay inequity for women compounds the issues that already exist with our broken health care system. This is a system that makes unfair practices by insurance companies flourish, such as allowing health to be more expensive for women. For example, women pay higher premiums than men when they try to buy health insurance directly from an insurance company through the individual health insurance market (a practice known as gender rating.) Even worse is that many of these health plans do not cover maternity care or expect women to pay an additional fee (what is called a rider) to gain maternity coverage. Women are then left trying to stretch their already smaller paycheck for a much larger health care bill.

This results in one out of four women saying that she is unable to pay her medical bills. In addition, due to prohibitive costs, women are more likely than men—regardless of insurance status—to have left a prescription unfilled; not seen a specialist when needed; skipped a medical test, treatment, or follow-up; or had a medical problem but not seen a doctor or clinic. And 18 percent of women in America go without health insurance.

In our fight for health care reform that works for women, we cannot ignore the significant wage gap that will always make health care that much less affordable for women and their families. So as we mark the date that women’s wages finally catch up to what men earned in the previous year, we are faced with the reality that fighting a war on two fronts may not be easy but will definitely be worth it. Just an important reminder about why it’s important to make sure health reform meets the needs of women.

For more information about the National Women’s Law Center Reform Matters project, please visit www.nwlc.org/reformmatters.

Visit the National Women’s Law Center website to see who else is writing about workplace fairness for women on this Equal Pay Day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 7:30 am and is filed under Consumer Health Care, Cost, Coverage Policy, Disparities, Insurance, Women's Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.