So apparently the First Lady took the opportunity recently to channel NOW president Terry O'Neill in a speech about healthcare.  According to Michelle Obama, our screwed-up healthcare system is particularly a problem for women.  Indeed, if she ventured a kind word for the male half of the population, this article doesn't mention it (Salon.com, 9/19/09).

Reading directly from the NOW script, Obama pronounced health insurers guilty of across-the-board discrimination against women because they charge them higher premiums.  Now, to even the most casual reader, that assertion doesn't pass the smell test.  First, gender discrimination in insurance premiums is illegal under federal law and, I suspect, under the laws of many and possibly all the states.  So if there are that many women being discriminated against, where are all the lawsuits?

The fact that few if any women are suing these companies strongly suggests that it's not discrimination that explains the higher premiums women pay, so it must be something else.  What could that be?  Well, the insurance industry says it's because women utilize more health resources than men do.  They're more likely to go to the doctor and they live longer, all of which means insurance companies pay out more for women's healthcare than they do for men's.  Ergo, higher premiums.

But all of that is far to simple, straightforward and, well, factual for the likes of NOW and its mouthpiece in the White House.  Worse, it strongly suggests that women are in fact not being discriminated against, and we can't have people believing that.

Obama went on to breathlessly inform us that women are being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions.  Say it ain't so, O!

As I pointed out in my piece on the NOW disinformation on the subject, healthcare is the perfect issue for feminists to show that they're not anti-male.  After all, what could be easier to say than "men and women alike are denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions?"  Why pretend that what insurance companies do to all is in some way uniquely visited on women?  It's not.  The system screws men at least as much as it does women, so why not say so?

Worse still is this:

She argued that women are hit hardest by medical issues because of the caretaker role they play within families, as well as their tendency to have part-time jobs in the world at large that don't offer insurance.

To the extent that that maladroit sentence means anything, it suggests that women, because they tend to hold part-time jobs, are more likely than men to be uninsured.  Except they aren't.  According to the data of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2008, there were about 19.8 million nonelderly men uninsured in the United States versus about 16.2 million uninsured women.  There were also about 8 million uninsured children, of whom, about 6 million were eligible for, but not covered by, the SCHIP program.

So, desperate as they always seem to be to paint women as victims of whatever the threat du jour might be, feminists once again get it wrong.  Once again, their claim that women are  uniquely injured because of their sex proves to be factually incorrect.  This is scarcely news.  The only thing different this time is that the disinformation is coming from the White House.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Feminism/NOW, Gender Issues (Misc.), Health.