With the passage of health care reform last month, being a woman will no longer be considered a pre-existing condition.

More specifically, the new law included significant advances for women (pdf). Those advances include:

• Forbidding the practice of gender rating, where insurance companies charge women higher premiums than men for the same coverage; and
• Prohibiting coverage denials and exclusions for women with pre-existing conditions, such as pregnancy, having a Caesarean section, breast or cervical cancer, or being a survivor of domestic or sexual violence.

These new provisions will be implemented in 2014. However, within 90 days, a new program of high-risk pools will be created that will enable those who have been uninsured due to a pre-existing condition to purchase affordable health coverage.

Previous Effects of Health Care System

Gender rating has had a large effect on women who try to buy coverage through the individual market. This practice has also made it hard for small and midsize businesses that employ mostly women — such as home health care agencies — to purchase affordable group coverage.

Workplace sexual discrimination laws prevent employers from passing the higher costs resulting from gender-rating practices onto their employees. However, as a result of gender rating, businesses with a predominately female workforce “have been unable to offer health coverage or have been able to afford it only by using plans with very high deductibles,” the New York Times recently reported.

Direct-Care Workers Will Benefit

The new rule prohibiting gender rating will benefit direct-care workers — 90 percent of whom are women — who cannot afford health insurance.

To learn more about the current coverage status of direct-care workers, see PHI’s Women Caring for Women: Coverage is Critical to Care (pdf).

For more on provisions that will impact the direct-care workforce, see PHI’s analysis of health care reform (pdf).

More on Women and Health Reform

The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) has long been active on the issue, launching a campaign to eliminate gender inequalities in health coverage last October.

The initiative was spurred by the NWLC’s report, Still Nowhere to Turn: Insurance Companies Treat Women Like a Pre-Existing Condition (pdf).

NWLC’s website contains more information on how women will be affected by health reform, including a webinar.

– by Meghan Shineman