The pink tax (which refers to gender-based discrepancies in the pricing of products and services) is not relegated to the drugstore aisles. There also happens to be a pink tax on women’s time—they tend to have less of it since more hours are devoted to caretaking and household chores than their male counterparts—and we’re now seeing the reverberations when it comes to their health care. Women are a country’s core health care customers, spending significantly more than men: Women comprise the majority (around 80%) of the patient base. But looking at the discrepancies in women’s spending on health care, it is wondered how their experience of it actually was. That question became the impetus for a far-reaching survey recently commissioned among workforce-age women (between 18 to 60), the results of which reveal some staggering truths about the vast gap between spending and actual care.
Women felt both like they didn’t have a clear diagnosis for what was ailing them (67%) and that they were dismissed by their health care provider: 50% said they were quickly prescribed Band-Aid medication without getting to a root cause. And this statistic will be unsurprising to many women: 15% had previously been told their complaints were all in their heads. One of the biggest areas we saw with this survey is just how much women are not heard, dismissed, and gaslit. And how much women have been culturally conditioned into thinking that there is nothing out of the ordinary about feeling unwell. Women are living with these symptoms—they’re bloated and exhausted and brain fogged and have joint pain and headaches—because they think it’s normal. Many women come in swarming with symptoms but with no diagnosis: Autoimmune disease, which is skewed 80% to women, can take an average of five years to be diagnosed. And many women, present with undiagnosed thyroid conditions. (One in five women will be diagnosed in their lifetime.) Their symptoms (like weight gain, depression, high cholesterol, sluggish GI tract, and feeling cold) often prompted previous doctors to quickly put them on antidepressants and blood-pressure meds without proper testing, and some had even developed secondary GI issues because their thyroid wasn’t treated.
But the most staggering takeaway from the survey was that 80% of women were simply delaying medical care. The reasons were time poverty and feeling like they were going to go to the doctor and basically just be dismissed, handed a pill, and shuffled out the door not getting what they need. And the third was cost. A recent consumer survey supported those findings, with one in five women saying they decided not to see a doctor when sick because of cost and one in seven delaying follow-up care because of cost. And its fall research report (aptly titled
“Hiding in plain sight: The health care gender toll”)
delved further into gender-based pricing discrepancies and found that women are paying significantly more in out-of-pocket health care costs, a disparity that persists even when you take out all the charges related to pregnancy. The value that we get for a dollar is less than the value that men get. We’re paying more for the services that we get because we use health care differently. Women often don’t reach their out-of-pocket mark, and the services they need require more co-pays, so they end up paying the same amount for premiums as men but getting less value, even though they use certain health care services—like radiology, physical and occupational therapy, emergency-room visits, and mental health services—more than men.
One common gap in spending is around breast cancer screenings. Your initial preventive screening is covered, but, many women’s medical needs require additional tests. Research shows that one in 10 women will have an abnormal initial diagnostic mammogram. The way that cost sharing is designed, once you’re that one out of 10 women, your costs skyrocket because then you need an ultrasound or a biopsy or an MRI, and all of these are additional co-pays. What if insurance costs were designed not as one-size-fits-all but with women’s biological and physiological needs in mind. For example, an insurance company could create an episode of care that once you have an abnormal test, your co-pays are a single amount as opposed to being à la carte, where you’re paying for every single thing until you get to the final answer.
To begin to close some of these gaps, the report suggested employers look at how they design their benefits and what the value is of the care women are getting, and lower the cost sharing of services that women use with more frequency. In both the medical world and our culture at large, we’ve all been trained to not go to the doctor until you’re really sick. It should be in the health care system’s interest to be more proactive about health. In the meantime, though, it’s on women to be proactive both about seeking out care when they need it and evaluating how that care is covered. Now, about that tax on women’s time….
Adapted from: Vogue
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