More Part-Time Jobs? Not Without Health Care Reform

Delia, I, too, would have liked to see the U.S. government borrow a page from the British handbook on offering workers more flexible work arrangements. But, until we've cracked health insurance reform, more part-time jobs means more economic trouble for women. Because, when women buy their own health insurance, they lose, and they lose big.

Without either employer-derived health insurance or a government plan, most part-time workers -- even the rapidly growing number of those who work full-time hours at multiple part-time jobs -- either have to do without insurance or purchase their own. And the individual insurance market is a brutal place for women. Only ten states prohibit insurance companies from gender discrimination in pricing. if you're not lucky enough to live in one of those states, your gender is going to cost you quite a bit over your lifetime.

According to the National Women's Law Center, if a woman is 25, the same insurance plan will cost her anywhere between 6 percent and 45 percent more than what her male counterparts pay. At 40, she'll be paying between from 4 percent to 48 percent more. It's only in the over-55 bracket that women's health insurance costs start to be outpaced by men's costs, to the tune of 8 percent to 22 percent less.

Insurance companies have pointed out that women visit the doctor's office more than men do -- some statistics show as much as 50 percent more. But, whether that even translates into actual higher medical costs -- as opposed to a patient who does not receive that same preventative care -- has not been shown.

Women's higher costs don't even take into account the number of insurance plans that refuse to cover certain aspects of health care, such as maternity care, either by classifying it as a pre-existing condition or simply by writing in a clause that it won't be covered. They also assume she will be able to find a company that will cover her. This is not the case for everyone, as with survivors of domestic violence, who can be denied coverage or charged more by insurance companies who classify a history of abuse as a pre-existing condition; or, as with Christina Turner, who was unable to get coverage after she took a month's worth of anti-AIDS medication after being raped, even though she never developed the virus; or, as with Peggy Robertson, a Colorado mother of two whose insurance company thoughtfully informed her that it would be more than happy to extend coverage to her -- just as soon as she got sterilized. After all, those pregnancy bills could really add up.

I'd be delighted to see men and women alike be able to choose more flexible work arrangements. For one thing, it would open up more possibilities for how families divide up household and childcare duties. But -- without health coverage options that don't depend on the whims of insurance companies -- these new employment options wouldn't offer Americans much of a choice at all.