Young men don't want to pay for women's OB care?

[mainer]

Well, maybe young women don't want to pay for young men's higher rates of accidents, cirrhosis, smoking-related diseases, assaults, and just about higher mortality rates from everything.

Guys, health care goes both ways.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/06/17/192670490/why-men-die-younger-than-women-the-guys-are-fragile-thesis

Male vs. female mortality rates:

The Baby Difference

Then come birthdays. More boy babies get born than girl babies. This is true all over the world. In America, it's 105 males for every 100 females. But as soon as they're out, the boys start to go. Male babies born prematurely die more often than females. Birth weight is not as strong a predictor as gender. You can be born impossibly small, and if you're a girl you are still slightly more likely to make it through.

The Adolescent Difference

The male disadvantage spikes during the teens and early 20s. This is the time when young men fight, go to war, dare and don't wear motorcycle helmets. Their deaths here are increasingly accidental, suicidal, homicidal or war related. "If deaths from violence are excluded," says a study from the Society of Actuaries, the spike in the early 20s disappears completely, though the female advantage remains. Not too long ago, young women got pregnant and many died having babies during their 20s, but in the modern era, childbirth mortality is down; male derring-do less so.

The Middle Years Difference

Here the gender difference narrows and holds steady, but if you look across the years, men are more likely to die from injuries, and (at least in the USA) from suicide, respiratory cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema and coronary heart disease. Leading female diseases — breast cancer and cervical cancer — do damage, but not as much as the male diseases.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/555221_2

men drink alcohol more, and more often, than women,[10,11] and are more than twice as likely to die from chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.[7] Men are also two to four times more likely than women to die prematurely from unintentional injury, homicide, and suicide.[7] Perhaps most importantly, more men than women smoke cigarettes, although this difference is essentially nonexistent at the youngest ages, which shows that smoking rates are equalizing in the youngest age cohorts.[12,13] Smoking is particularly significant in this instance because estimates suggest that rising rates of smoking among men, relative to women, accounted for 75% of the increase in the gender gap in mortality between 1910 and 1962.[14] Current estimates suggest that smoking accounts for 25% of the overall sex mortality difference, and much more when cancer and respiratory disease mortality are separately considered.[9]

[elehhhhna]

1. How many of these men were delivered without medical assistance?

[Xipe Totec]

2. Young men are alive today due to good OB care

something to reflect on and be grateful for.

[mainer]

3. I can't understand men bitching about female healthcare costs

when men have higher rates of accidents and trauma from assaults. It doesn't occur to them that THEY might actually need catastrophic insurance far more than women do, since one major accident and a spinal cord injury costs far, far more than a typical childbirth.

[Xipe Totec]

8. We are all born. OBGYN service is kinda important to all of us

Even if we don't worry about rates of accidents and trauma from assaults, which thankfully some of us never have to experience, everyone is born.

Well, with the possible exception of certain personalities who were anally delivered and were technically never born but shat.

No offense, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Limbaugh, Bachmann, Coulter, and other various night crawlers.

[NightWatcher]

4. and none of the rest of us want to pay for Grandpa's boner pills

To be fair, bed rails are expensive and this keeps them from rolling out of bed and causing more injury

[Scuba]

5. Snort.

[Warpy]

6. They didn't look closely enough at female smoking rates

Many women who started when they were teenagers quit before they try to get pregnant in their 20s and early 30s. That could easily be the cause of the age disparity in those cohorts. Unless they enter a high stress period later on with parents and children both needing care, divorce, or other catastrophe, most stay quit.

Bottom line: teenagers of both sexes are equally immortal and dumb. The girls just get handed a reason to quit before the illnesses associated with smoking hit them. Thus the expenses incurred while producing the next generation of citizens and working people might be balanced in later life by lower smoking induced chronic illness rates.

[PumpkinAle]

7. Knee jerk reaction to the false stories put out

by the right. Sadly most of these young men will eventually want to settle down and have a family and are not thinking that insurance spreads the risk so they won't be footing the whole bill themselves.

This is from the LATimes

Let's examine why maternity care is written into all insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act. The reasons fall into three categories. In ascending order of importance, they are:

1. It takes two to tango. It's true, as Ellers observed, no man has ever given birth to a baby. It's also true that no baby has ever been born without a man being involved somewhere along the line. Limit maternity coverage only to women of childbearing age, and you're giving many of these guys a free pass.

2. Society has a vested interest in healthy babies and mothers. And that's all society, because unhealthy babies and mothers impose a cost on everybody -- in the expense of caring for them as wards of the public, and in the waste of social resources that comes from children unable to reach their full potential as members of society because of injuries or illnesses caused by poor prenatal and postnatal health.

Child mortality rates are among the most important indicators of a nation's overall health profile, and the U.S. rate stinks compared with the rest of the industrialized world's -- at 7 deaths of children under age 5 per 1,000 live births, it's worse than Israel's, South Korea's, Japan's and every Western European nation's. That's why maternity and newborn care and pediatric services are among the 10 health benefits that Obamacare requires to be part of every health plan.

Some of these benefits are so important, they're required to be among the free benefits of catastrophic health plans that may be sold to individuals under the age of 30. They include anemia screening for pregnant women and folic acid supplements for women of childbearing age.

The most important reason is this one:

3. Universal coverage is the only way to make maternity coverage affordable.

Up to now -- before Obamacare's rules kick in Jan. 1 -- only 12% of policies in the individual insurance market offered maternity coverage. Those that offered the coverage often did so as separate riders imposing huge deductibles for maternity care alone -- $5,000 for maternity services, according to a 2010 survey by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and limits on benefits of only a few thousand dollars. The cost of maternity and newborn care is the principal reason that, pre-Obamacare, women were systematically charged more for health insurance than men.

Because insurers pitched maternity coverage in the indivdual market only to buyers of chilbearing age, the premiums were high and they still made almost no money on them. One company internal memo reviewed by the committee stated that its loss on maternity riders came to 90% of income, a money-losing ratio," the memo said.

More at http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-pregnancy-20131101,0,5148721.story#axzz2l95dk9wD