'Insurance Card': Coming Soon to A Theatre Near You?

by Brigette Courtot, Senior Policy Analyst
National Women’s Law Center

This post is part of a weekly series on Women and Health Reform.

Do you remember that awful movie a few years back called Green Card?  The one where Andie MacDowell and Gerard Depardieu have a marriage of convenience so that he can get a green card and remain in the states? Well, an article in yesterday’s New York Times suggests a sequel in the making: "Insurance Card.” The article highlights several couples who have been forced to make major decisions about marriage or divorce for the sake of health insurance. Is it long before we see people getting into marriages of convenience just to get the health coverage they need?

A couple of months ago I posted a blog entry about my best friend’s decision to get married in a clandestine civil ceremony months before her wedding date, all to avoid becoming uninsured. It’s great to see that this issue is getting more publicity, because if anything demonstrates the extent of our health system’s problems, it is stories like these. When getting health insurance is a primary factor in choices about whether and when to commit to a lifelong partner (or whether and when to leave a marriage that is not working), then we clearly have a problem with the availability of health insurance. Women in particular may face these types of unfortunate choices, because they are more likely than men to be covered under their partner’s job-based health insurance.

One of the women featured in the NYT article is a recent kidney-transplant recipient facing an unaffordable annual premium of over $10,000 for the policy that supplements her Medicare coverage — that’s right, this is the cost of a supplemental policy, for services that Medicare doesn’t reimburse. Imagine the policy she might face if her health condition wasn’t primarily covered through Medicare (most conditions aren’t for people under 65). She sums up her ordeal by stating, “I felt the only way I could get around this was to marry him.” How can we, as a nation, get around these major gaps in access to health insurance? Health reform that will guarantee quality affordable coverage for all women is the only solution.