So you ended up XY instead of XX. Get over yourself. Even conservatives generally stipulate that insurance should protect people from the financial consequences of random events. But they seem not to recognize that being born a woman is a random event. Sorry, dudes, you had no control over that. Allowing insurers to discriminate based on gender means penalizing half the population, just because those folks ended up with one type of chromosome instead of another.
Of course, if you acknowledge [this point] it has some implications for the rest of the health care debate. If we’re not going to make people pay higher premiums because of genes that determined their gender, then what about people born with genetic abnormalities? Or predisposition to diabetes, heart attack, or cancer? Pretty soon you end up arguing that it’s wrong to charge higher premiums to people who, through no fault of their own, happen to need more medical care—thereby conceding one of Obamacare’s core principles.
–Jon Cohn, The New Republic
@afrakt (yeah, via an iThingy)
