Rape Victim's Choice: Risk HIV/AIDS or Health Insurence?

Is this something that the healthcare plans in Congress will address?

Yes, which is why you are hearing about this now...Normally no one gives much care to such injustices in this society. The insurance companies for a long time have gotten away with murder, under the smoke screen of "free enterprise", for instance the normal practice of looking for any excuse to drop those with policies as soon as it becomes clear that they have developed expensive to treat medical problems. Did you hear about that till the last six months in the media? Why now, and why not before? you know the answer.

Aren't healthcare companies still going to ask about medical history? Won't healthier people still receive the best rates? I understand not dropping someone who get sick; but can they no longer deny coverage to people who are sick?

I've been hearing about such cases for years, partially because I've been an advocate for change and also because I have a number of relatives in the medical field who've told horror stories about sick people and their battles with insurance companies. New regulations would make it impossible for insurers to turn down high risk people, but so far there are no caps on what they can charge for premiums. Insurance companies are still free to "weed" out these people by making the premiums too expensive for high-risk people to afford.

what has that got to do with the price of tea in china?? Ending the legal ability to refuse insurance is better than not doing it, and so advocates are rolling out these kinds of stories in the hopes that public pressure for health reform can be built.

The hope, as best I understand it, is that after the law change those with preexisting conditions will have little trouble joining large plans. In large plans the cost of one sickly person is spread amongst many, and the insurance companies will in theory be under pressure to price fairly because otherwise they will lose a lot of policy holders. The economics of health care delivery (HMO's) works on bulk, so they can not afford to let huge groups of people get away, defect to another company.

The reality is that expensive patients will always be undesirable. Even if we toss in the 47 million + people who are currently uninsured (and some of them are not healthy) it will not make insurance companies embrace the seriously ill with equal footing. Aetna would rather have it's sick patients go off to Blue Cross and Blue Cross would rather they sign up with Prudential and all them would prefer the patient end up on Medicaid or in a grave. As long as profits are involved, and these companies are in it for profit, they will have a incentive to price out certain people.

This particular issue would have come to the fore long ago if all women who were raped actually reported it in such a way that insurers knew (even pre aids, they could have had syphilis, y'know), and insurance companies acted on it as a decider. Consider the possible low levels of insured women.

Women have always been charged more by insurance companies because of pregnancy possibilities and the reality that women usually require more medical treatment than men throughout a lifetime (we also live longer). The hazards of rape are just another excuse to refuse coverage or charge more.

some of the proposed plans would make it illegal to charge women more....which sounds like a trip to the SCOTUS, because I am pretty sure that the insurance companies can document that women cost more. Not just pregnancy, desire to be pregnant, and rape, but also overall mental health care. Men do not seek mental health care like women do, they go untreated more often thus are cheaper.

The obvious reply is that women are healing on mental health and men are going to hell on it.

I'm not that strident, but there's a grain of truth in it, I suppose, re the general population - I don't know, maybe, maybe not. Re a2k, I see our male posters often suggest counselling.