Cirrhosis, Huntington’s Chorea, Parkinson’s Disease, and now rape: perfectly valid reasons for denial of health insurance coverage. One of these things is not like the other, and while womens’ health groups have tried to raise awareness via the web for years, it remains largely unknown that such denial of services is de rigueur within the corporate machine of American health care.
In fact, up until the reintroduction of the SAFE Act earlier this month, half of all major health insurers in the United States routinely denied coverage to victims of not only rape, but domestic abuse as well as using the “pre-existing conditions” as a factor when calculating insurance costs.
Danielle Ivory’s article brings more widespread attention to the issue, which denies women in need affordable access to necessary health care including gynecological exams and mental health services. As a part of the Insurance Watchdog Investigation, Ivory outlines the conniving ways in which insurance companies deny care based on the presence of conditions such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and sexually transmitted diseases (or the preventative treatment of them) as opposed to sexual abuse itself (because that would be wrong).
(via @maudnewton)
