On his official web page, Governor Doyle announced his plan to ensure all health insurers in the state cover treatment for autism.

With $25,000 to $50,000 in guaranteed coverage per policy per year, it is quite easy for the governor to pawn this off as a victory for the thousands of families in the state responsible for children with autism. The only problem is that insurance mandates affect all policies and policy holders within the state.

Bogged down with mandates, state health insurers charge rates ignorant of actual healthcare needs. Familiar to many is the fact that women and men pay the same for health insurance despite the fact that women and men don’t become even close to comparable in the number of annual treatments until middle age.

According to findings from a study involving University of Michigan researchers and published by the Health Education and Research Trust, per capita expenditure on healthcare is 26 percent greater for women than men over the course of a lifetime, but only 2/5ths of this extra cost is explained by women tending to have more longevity.

If one takes time to crunch the numbers, healthcare costs $55,500 more for women over a lifetime, excluding any feminine claims to longevity, than men on the sole condition that women require more medical treatments, or at least more expensive treatments over the course of a lifetime.

Consider this, current one-size-fits-all healthcare plans due to state mandates charge men for pap smears and mammograms which both can exceed $200 in procedural costs alone. Men, your insurers under the most egregious of state mandates factor in at least an extra $400 a year in medical costs per year which is taken into account when insurers determine rate schemes.

Women should be appalled as well. With prostate exams costing up to $400 a year, you too are being equally overcharged by a health insurance system bastardized by a state government hell bent on equality based, one-size-fits-all insurance mandates.

What exactly are these gratuitous expenses costing Wisconsin policy holders annually? On average, Wisconsinites pay for 22 percent of their health cost if they have an employer offered health plan, so taking procedural costs alone, Wisconsinites pay about $88 dollars a year on the two aforementioned benefits that they will never use alone. And that is only two of many money gouging mandates. Considering that men and women under the age of fifty do not receive colonoscopies, one can apply the same math to the $2,010 to $3,764 that colonoscopies cost, realize that regardless of age a colonoscopy is an insurance benefit factored into their coverage, and realize that probe in the butt or not, when it comes to health insurance and state benefit mandates, many policy holders are being screwed.

Then we come to the newest healthcare mandates on autism treatment. Surely autism treatment is necessary, and of course insurance premiums averaging $4,777 per employee taking health insurance through work seem like an attractive way to receive necessary autism treatment, but $25,000 to $50,000 per policy in available benefits will inevitably result in recalculation of insurance rates and coverage schemes that will surely result in higher premiums. The aforementioned situation may seem to the thousands of people in the state who need coverage for autism treatment and their families who can’t afford to individually pay $50,000, but such utility is undoubtedly a mask for an unnecessary rate hike for the majority of Wisconsinites who would stand to benefit not only from the tabling of this insurance mandate, but also, an end to all coverage mandates across the board.

If the state of Wisconsin ended all coverage mandates except for introducing on that removes pre-existing conditions from the criteria used to deny health coverage, and if insurance companies would offer coverage a la carte allowing consumers to only pay for coverage they actually need, health care premiums could decrease substantially.

New mandates on insurance coverage of autism related procedures sound good on paper, but in practice they will be another infamous state regulation driving up the cost of insurance causing more and more Wisconsinites to simply be unable to afford health insurance.