"Duurrrr Imma man why should I pay for some ladies mammygram?"
That's the whole f**king point of what a risk pool is. That's the whole point of what INSURANCE is.
Women utilize more healthcare spending than men, so wouldn't it be fair to have separate risk pools, one for men and one for women?
How far do you want to take that? Old people use more than young people, so should there be risk pools for different age groups (and how many different age groups)? Or you can slice the population any number of other ways. The bigger the risk pool, the better it is for the overall population. Yes, this means that the healthy subsidize the sick. That's the way insurance works: those who don't use it subsidize those who do. It's the same with home insurance, car insurance, or any other kind.
As I understand it, the main objection that many people have is that they don't want to be forced to subsidize the health care of others. You can debate whether it's moral and/or legal to force everyone to participate in such a scheme; after much thinking about it, I've come to the conclusion that it's both, but I recognize that there are reasonable arguments against this. However, if you accept that everybody is going to be covered, then putting everyone in the same pool is the best way to do it.
The men/women divide is the biggest slice you could make, as it falls somewhere in the neighborhood of 49/51. So what we'd get with one large pool is a transfer of income from men to women. I'm not talking about dividing it by smaller and smaller groups. Among both men and women groups, we expect there to be healthy and sick, and young and old, so their pools would still have to cover the sub-groups that use more healthcare because most people will get sick at some point and most people will grow old, but they aren't about to suddenly wake up as the opposite sex and have to deal with those sex-specific health care concerns.
In fact why is it the wage gape conspiracy theorists never bring up the fact that men pay in more for health insurance and taxes than they take out compared to women? Men have been subsidizing women with their incomes for years, but we're supposed to care that a woman with a gender studies degree doesn't earn the same amount than a man with an engineering degree.
This is the way health insurance you to be, if you went out and purchased it yourself.
I know, because I was doing this myself, and I remember seeing that there was a different premium (monthly payment) for men versus women.
But the difference was NOT anything significant. I wasn't tiny either, but I would describe it as a "small" difference.
Whether it was big enough to scream "the sky is falling" (and we need 2 pools) .... well, I guess each person has their opinion.
