Cardozo Law Review
Abstract
In our country, access to insurance can be a matter of life and death, as well as financial security. Despite these great stakes, the cost and quality of insurance are often influenced by social factors like sexual orientation, age, gender, and race. Such discrimination, forbidden in other settings like employment, is forgiven in insurance, even seen as fairer, on the grounds of actuarial fairness. That is, insurance classifications are lawful so long as they are based on evidence that some groups are costlier to insure, with the understanding that others shouldn't have to offset those expenses. This Article challenges this concept of fairness in insurance using a stigma-based critique. The sociological stigma literature describes a natural and frequent social tendency to seek out differences, stereotype, and create underclasses who enjoy less social standing and experience structural and individual discrimination. Considering insurance through the lens of stigma reveals that it is no more inoculated from social context nor human nature than any other part of our lives. Of course, some people will be costlier to insure, but stigma theory suggests that we may be incapable of determining this in an unbiased way free from harmful social constructs. To guard against unfair insurance underclasses, we should ban discrimination in insurance as in other contexts.
Disciplines
Civil Rights and Discrimination | Insurance Law | Law | Law and Society
Recommended Citation
Valerie K. Blake,
Ensuring an Underclass: Stigma in Insurance,
41
Cardozo L. Rev.
1441
(2020).
Available at:
https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol41/iss4/5