US women are paying billions more for healthcare than men every year

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.

Author: Charlotte Edmond, Senior Writer, Forum Agenda

• The average working woman in the US spends 18% more on healthcare costs than a man.
• Women visit healthcare professionals more often than men and the services they receive more often surpass the deductibles.
• The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report shows that progress on gender parity has stalled, but health and survival is one of the smallest gaps remaining.

Working women in the States are estimated to pay $15 billion more each year on healthcare costs than working men. This gender-divided financial burden persists even when maternity-related services are excluded, according to new research by Deloitte.

This works out as an average employed woman on single coverage having approximately $266 – or 18% – more out-of-pocket spending on healthcare per year than a man, excluding pregnancy-related expenses.

Employers in the US are required to provide healthcare insurance premiums at an equal cost to women and men. But this does not reflect the actual cost as premiums are only part of the financial story, Deloitte says – further exacerbating the gender pay gap.

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What is the World Economic Forum doing to improve healthcare systems?

The Global Health and Strategic Outlook 2023 highlighted that there will be an estimated shortage of 10 million healthcare workers worldwide by 2030.

The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Health and Healthcare works with governments and businesses to build more resilient, efficient and equitable healthcare systems that embrace new technologies.

Learn more about our impact:

• Global vaccine delivery: Our contribution to COVAX resulted in the delivery of over 1 billion COVID-19 vaccines and our efforts in launching Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has helped save more than 13 million lives over the past 20 years.
• Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative: Through this collaborative initiative, we are working to accelerate progress in the discovery, testing and delivery of interventions for Alzheimer’s – building a cohort of 1 million people living with the disease who provide real-world data to researchers worldwide.
• Mental health policy: In partnership with Deloitte, we developed a comprehensive toolkit to assist lawmakers in crafting effective policies related to technology for mental health.
• Global Coalition for Value in Healthcare: We are fostering a sustainable and equitable healthcare industry by launching innovative healthcare hubs to address ineffective spending on global health. In the Netherlands, for example, it has provided care for more than 3,000 patients with type 1 diabetes and enrolled 69 healthcare providers who supported 50,000 mothers in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• UHC2030 Private Sector Constituency: This collaboration with 30 diverse stakeholders plays a crucial role in advocating for universal health coverage and emphasizing the private sector’s potential to contribute to achieving this ambitious goal.

Want to know more about our centre’s impact or get involved? Contact us.

A disproportionate cost to women

Deloitte’s findings are based on a sample of more than 16 million people in the US with employer-sponsored healthcare.

The analysis shows that men are far more likely to wait more than two years between visits to see a healthcare professional. And when they do visit, they are likely to have fewer services than women – 46% of men have less than $1,000 in claims annually compared to just 35% of women. The medical services women access generally surpass the typical deductible, resulting in higher costs.

On top of this, analysis suggests that the actuarial value of the coverage offered to women – the percentage of average costs that a plan will cover – was less than to men. Or put otherwise, women consistently get less value from their insurance premiums than men do.

Closing the gender gap

“[The] combination of higher health care expenditures and the gender wage gap can negatively impact the financial and health status for employed women, potentially creating a choice between the care women need and the care they can afford,” the report says.

This theme is reflected in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2023, which finds that efforts to close the gender gap are stalling and will take an additional 131 years to reach parity. The gap explicitly relating to health and survival is 96% closed.