Women Should Pay More for Insurance, Say Professional Trolls at TIME

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TIME should get it over with and change its name to TROL magazine already, because 1- seriously, that’s all they do now, and 2- both TIME and TROL work as knuckle tats, and I think knuckle tat-ability should be considered more frequently in the naming of things.

Today’s TIMEtroll is brought to you by Hadley Heath, who is a woman so it’s somehow more genuine/credible if she tries to argue in a way that is contrary to her own interests/dumb. Heath argues that women should pay more for health insurance because they consume more health care, and having everyone pay the same amount for health care isn’t fair to the men. Poor men. Always getting the shaft in everything.

This attempt at fairness is anything but. If fairness were really the guiding principle it would be quite simple: Women would pay more for health insurance because women consume more health care.

Feel yourself getting mad? Don’t do it! Don’t let the anger take control! Don’t give in to the Dark Side of The Force!

But— you might say, eyes wide and twitching with anticipatory rhetorical smacking down — but what about the fact that women have babies and that every human being alive is alive because some woman made that human with her babymaking parts? Oh, the piece has already counterargued.

But child-bearing is not the only reason women’s health costs are higher. There are certain non-sex-related ailments that plague women with more frequency. When I sustained my second significant injury from running this year, I learned that stress fractures are more common among women. This also goes for strains and sprains. Women’s bodies tend to be smaller and more prone to wear and tear.

Yeah, women’s bones keep getting broken! This has literally nothing to do with men. Unless, uh, you count those times that men are the reason that women are in the hospital (1 of 50 women with broken bones at a hospital has broken bones due to domestic violence. Domestic violence is among the top causes of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 in this country, and the vast majority of domestic violence perpetrators are men. About a quarter of women are physically victimized by their spouses or domestic partners. Cool point, Hadley Heath.)

ARGH! They did it again! I almost got mad. Breathe, guys. We’ll get through this. Take my hand as we embark on the next leg of this Cormac McCarthy-esque journey.

Yet women also tend to live longer. Life expectancy for American women is 81 years, compared to 76 for men. That’s great news for women who get to enjoy more life, but it’s also five more years of costly doctor’s visits and treatments.

Yeah a long life filled with costly doctor’s visits and treatments sounds super enjoyable. When I was a nursing assistant at a long term care facility in high school and almost every resident was a woman, they were having a great fucking time. They loved it! That’s why nursing homes are super happy places full of fun and joy.

Aw, fuck. Anger stroke again. Mantra: TIME is doing this on purpose. TIME is doing this on purpose. Quit giving them what they want. Let’s soldier on:

People are uncomfortable in acknowledging sex differences in health care costs, but they should recognize that those same differences crop up in in other markets, too. It’s not discussed as frequently, but sometimes men are the ones paying more for certain purchases, like car insurance. Would it be fair to charge women more for it just to give men a discount?

Men pay more for insurance based on a system similar to the one that Hadley Heath is proposing, and so by using its unjustness as an example to bolster her argument, she’s in fact arguing against herself. And there are plenty of arenas in which women pay more than their fair share — men are bigger and heavier to haul than women yet women pay the same amount for seats on airplanes and buses and trains, women shell out the same amount of money as men to finance a police force and a prison system that overwhelmingly deals with men who break laws, women pay for wars that men instigate and fight, women subsidize men’s large manly appetites at Old Country Buffet, and every time a woman leaves the goddamn house she needs to worry about some man pulling her into an alleyway and doing god knows what. Congress is 81% male, and women don’t have to pay less than men for their salaries. Women do more housework than men, even when they spend the same amount of time working outside of the home. I mean if we’re going to hold individuals accountable for the collective actions of their gender (which is absurd to begin with, if you didn’t catch my drift from the Old Country Buffet reference), let’s at least be intellectually consistent.

AND FURTHERMORE—

Goddamn it. Falling for it again. Shitfuck. Ugh.

Seriously, TIME? You’re not even trying to hide it anymore. This JV-level trolling couldn’t be more obvious if it was accompanied by an elderly woman smugly breastfeeding a prominent Men’s Rights Activist who advocates for Eternal Attachment Mothering for male children.

Do better.

[TIME]

 
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