Domestic violence is a pre-existing condition. I didn't know that.

The BBQ Pit
1

I feel for the insurance companies. According to Milton Friedman, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”. The statement contains no prohibition on hiring lobbyists to obtain a regulatory environment to their liking, so that must be ok too.

Within the American health care system, the name of the game is to expend resources so as to make somebody else pay the big health care bills. So it’s no surprise that the US spent $5700 per person on medical care in 2003, while France spent $3050 and that the US had an inferior life expectancy to those damn frogs. In this particular application, it seems that wives who have been beaten by their husbands in the past are more likely to sustain costly injuries in the future, so it makes sense to deny them insurance. It’s better to insure people who are less likely to need care, and leave the tougher cases for someone else.

Cite on percapita stuff: http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm
Cite on domestic violence as a pre-existing condition: When Getting Beaten By Your Husband Is A Pre-Existing Condition | HuffPost Latest News
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/09/meet-the-10-senators-who-vetoed-insurance-protection-for-domestic-violence-survivors.html

As part of their march towards socialism, the Democrats in 2006 offered an amendment to end the practice in the Health Education Labor & Pensions Committee. The vote was 10-10, which meant that the proposal would not even come up for a vote in the Senate. Here’s a list of Senators who believed that domestic violence was a valid pre-existing condition:

  • Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)
  • Richard Burr (R-N.C.)
  • John Ensign (R-Nev.)
  • Mike Enzi (R-Wy.)
  • Bill Frist (R-Tenn.)
  • Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)
  • Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)
  • Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.)
  • Pat Roberts (R-Kan.)
  • Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)

This month, Mike Enzi explained his logic to CQ: “If you have no insurance, it doesn’t matter what services are mandated by the state.” That’s a psychologically interesting perspective Senator. But we aren’t talking about mandating the scope of a health care plan. Let’s take a look at this Aug 2000 report:

We’re talking about denial of coverage here – for everything it seems. So if a guy has beaten his wife in the past, the wife might not be able to get medical insurance for anything else.

Still, I think it’s reasonable to mandate that insurance companies cover bodily trauma – I’m not sure whether a policy that excluded that would really be a meaningful form of insurance.

Now admittedly most states have rules in place barring the treatment of domestic violence as a pre-existing condition. But in the more market friendly states of Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming, insurance companies can do what is best for their shareholders and pass victims of domestic violence to some other payer of health care. Interestingly all of these states less one were ranked in the lower half of per person income in the US. It seems that the poorer most backward states in the union are the ones with greatest emotional attachment to modern conservative free market principles.

2

Christ on a crutch. Man, you 'Merikuns are cold.

3

Can you provide some sort of link to this? Not that I’m particularly interested in defending Republicans, but this has the potential to be one of those “gotcha” moments. You know, where a bill is defeated and the “no” voters get crap for one aspect of the bill when they voted no over the other 4,999 things the bill introduced.

As an aside, I think Friedman is right. Businesses use someone’s money, they have a responsibility to their investor to give them a return, based on the laws under which they operate. Corporate officers do not have a responsibility to overspend the investor’s money to do what is “right”, because it’s not their money. This is one reason why I think private business is ill-suited for the health care game, without the government really cracking down on them, and basically turning them into quasi-public entities.

4

She should have seen he was always going to get nasty. No one’s fault but her own.

Stitch that, you stupid . . . wife!

5

Another thread on the subject.

6

That’s why after a good beatdown, I do what the French do…I make her down a bottle of Louis Jadot.

7

Hey, maybe universal health care would make people angrier about physical abuse. Those are your tax dollars being spent every time she (or he) ends up in the emergency room! Even people who think people getting abused by their partners deserve it, or it’s a private matter, should already be mad. It’s estimated that domestic violence costs employers $3 to $5 billion a year in lost days of work and reduced productivity.

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I reviewed the list of companies that are listed in the Huffington Post article that are said to have denied coverage or in part based rate decisions on this. They list 8 companies, but only 2 of them even write health insurance. And that is from 1995.

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"Of course it’s a pre-existing condition! You were a woman when you took out the policy, weren’t you?!"

[inapplicable in Massachusetts, California, and cases of godless perversion of nature]

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That would be Aetna and Principal Financial Group, presumably. The best cite I could come up with is here:" An informal survey in 1994 by the staff of the Subcommittee on crime and Criminal Justice of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that 8 of the 16 largest insurers in the country used domestic violence as a factor when deciding whether to issue insurance and how much to charge."

So we know that the practice wasn’t uncommon in the mid 1990s. We know that legislative bodies have refused to curb the practice: by extension we can surmise something about their lobbyists. Notwithstanding turnover in underwriting activities, I see little reason to believe in a wave of unprofitable enlightenment among insurers.

Well, it was an amendment to a bill, which implies narrower scope. I haven’t seen a copy of it online, but are amendments that never make it out of committee even published?

ETA: Oh yeah. They don’t have these debates in other countries AFAIK. In certain European countries, insurers are a central part of the health care system, but they are disallowed from denying policies based on pre-existing conditions of any stripe. So they are forced to compete on the basis of efficiency.
Nitpicking is good though: we’re here to fight ignorance. Along those lines, the Huffington Post article has been updated 3 times. North Carolina says that a 1997 law prohibits insurers from using domestic violence as a pre-existing condition – if you have a group plan. For individuals it’s more complicated: the state’s attorneys have recently concluded that domestic violence doesn’t meet the state’s definition of a medical condition. So if a battered spouse with an individual plan is denied insurance, she might have grounds for appeal.

The Mississippi Insurance Commissioner is on the case. They are not aware of this practice occurring in the state and believe that such a denial would conflict with their Unfair Trade Practices Act. But if the Mississippi legislature wanted to take action, they would support that.

Wyoming hasn’t received any complaints from battered women about this either. I must admit though, if I was denied coverage by an insurance company, it wouldn’t occur me to write to the state’s regulatory authorities: I didn’t know that the law had potential wiggle room. There’s no word from the other 6 states.