Insurance companies. Those evil corporations with funny commercials. You can’t live with them and literally you can’t live without them. Before the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare brought millions of uninsured people away from the brink, they were just about worst of the worst. Nowadays they’re no longer denying dying people the care they need, their just being huge jerks to women.
CNN has a story of a woman named Michelle Weber who wanted to get her insurance company to pay for what the kids are calling female Viagra or Addyi But wait a second. Insurance companies shouldn’t have to pay for pills just so people can get it on. It’s not like it’s a life saving medicine. Low sex drive isn’t a real disease…unless your man.
Insurance companies gladly pay for the male version of the drug while they sent the woman in the CNN story to see a shrink.
“It’s a huge double standard,” said Weber’s gynecologist, Dr. Tami Rowen, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California-San Francisco. Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a sexual health specialist in San Diego for both men and women, said insurance companies have routinely rejected his prescriptions for Addyi, but that’s never been the case for Viagra.
“It’s startling. It’s so sexist,” said Goldstein, the president of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health, who has been a paid consultant to the pharmaceutical companies that make both Addyi and Viagra.
Seeking a psychiatrist wasn’t the only barrier set in front of women who want to have good sex. Instead of the more expensive drug the insurers were willing to pay for a cheaper drug, albeit one with more side effects. The logic of the companies is strained. Most are happy to pay for aging men to boost their sex lives but women are being denied in alarming numbers.
One researcher thinks she might know why:
Dr. Laura Hirshbein, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, said she’s dismayed but not surprised that insurance companies are often refusing to pay to treat women with sexual problems.
Hirshbein, who studies issues of gender, sex and psychiatry, said men with erectile dysfunction get a multitude of treatment options, which are often celebrated in giant advertising campaigns.
“Men get told they can expect to function sexually and can expect to easily get whatever they need in order to do that,” Hirshbein said.
But she said that historically, women have been told that if they have sexual problems, they must be mentally ill.
“Women are told it’s all in their head,” she added.
h/t CNN