Loading ...Robert Pear for the NY Times:
Striking new evidence has emerged of a widespread gap in the cost of health insurance, as women pay much more than men of the same age for individual insurance policies providing identical coverage, according to new data from insurance companies and online brokers…In general, insurers say, they charge women more than men of the same age because claims experience shows that women use more health care services. They are more likely to visit doctors, to get regular checkups, to take prescription medications and to have certain chronic illnesses.
Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, an advocacy group that has examined hundreds of individual policies, said: “The wide variation in premiums could not possibly be justified by actuarial principles. We should not tolerate women having to pay more for health insurance, just as we do not tolerate the practice of using race as a factor in setting rates.”
In Columbus, Ohio, a 30-year-old woman pays 49 percent more than a man of the same age for Anthem’s Blue Access Economy plan. The woman’s monthly premium is $92.87, while a man pays $62.30. At age 40, the gap is somewhat smaller, with Anthem charging women 38 percent more than men for that policy.
In job-based coverage, civil rights laws prohibit sex discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says employers cannot charge higher premiums to women than to men for the same benefits, even if women as a class are more expensive. Some states, including Maine, Montana and New York, have also prohibited sex-based rates in the individual insurance market.
A Very Sexy Second Life
Second Life is an enormous online community based on the all the tenets of real capitalist society. The virtual reality is composed of avatars or virtual representations of real people, who’ve formed communities structured on dollar-based economies in which things can be bought and sold. There’s also Sex Education. A project initiated by the University of Plymouth in Britain, the virtual world sex education island even features a free condom dispenser.
A blog about the project has updates on expansions and the success of the island. I first heard about the project via a talk delivered by sex-world impresario Cory Silverberg (SL:SeeLee Markstein) at the annual AASECT conference this past June. Silverberg is widely known with the sexual health and education community as the sex toy expert on late night talk show host Sue Johanson’s legendary Talk Sex and as one of the founders of Come As You Are, Canada’s only democratically run, workers coop sex shop. Silverberg also writes for About.com about, of all things, sex. In his presentation at the AASECT conference, he brought to my attention the viability of a virtual world-based sex education as particularly pertinent in the face of our technological explosion in the past decade and that sex education in Second Life seems to have lived up to its tremendous potential both for those who are reticent to interact in the physical realm and for those whom interacting in the physical world is more difficult (e.g. for the millions and millions of people who face unique obstacles as a result of disability). For the disabled, the intimacy of sex education in one’s own home and on one’s own terms is a tremendous step forward in the right direction in the furnishing of information for all individuals promoting informed and empowered decisions. The SIM, as a virtual locale is called, even has one feature that blurs the in-world (i.e. in Second Life) and real world boundaries as one-on-one consultations with “real” professionals are even available via a teleport to a private, elevated space within the SIM. The sex education island complements an already robust Healthinfo island with access to different webpages, information from the World Health Organization, educational kiosks on STI’s and a rotating Earth globe provides access to two Worldmapper’s maps of HIV prevalence and HIV/AIDS deaths. The sex ed SIM also features male-specific resources, like a tour of the testis. Meanwhile, last December the in-world got an outer world experience as a sesries of live seminars led by academic Barbara Hastings-Asatourian, a senior nursing lecturer and managing director of Contraception Education at Salford University were led on issues like contraception. (see the story at The Guardian). Of the seminars and island, Hastings-Asatourian said:
University of Plymouth Sexual Health SIM in Second Life from mnk boulos on Vimeo.
The virtual just got a whole lot sexier…………