You may or may not have heard about the new CareShield Life insurance scheme.

If you haven't already, here's a quick rundown:

One issue that came up quite quickly, however, is the fact that women will have to pay about S$50-60 extra in premiums compared to men — even after subsidies.

Several were pretty upset, some sufficiently so to start a petition for equal premiums too.

Explaining why women will have to pay more in her speech in Parliament that highlighted this fact, Senior Minister of State for Health Amy Khor said:

• Women live longer than men.
• Hence, women are more likely to spend more years in severe disability (because we are more likely to experience severe disability at old age).
• In 2017, average life expectancy for women at birth is 85.2 years versus men at 80.7 years. Since one out of every two Singaporeans at age 65 are expected to become severely disabled by the end of their lives, Khor says this extrapolates to three out of five healthy 65-year-old women and two out of five 65-year-old healthy men.
• Researchers (in 2009 and 2011-2) also found that women are expected to need more years of assistance with activities of daily living compared with men. In Singapore, this figure for women aged 60 is 7.8 years, versus 2.6 years for men aged 60.
• While she said the fact that women tend to "have less savings on average" compared to men, and could be better supported by them, applying different premiums between men and women "more accurately reflect(s) the differences in risk" between the genders and resulting in a fairer scheme.
• That being said, Khor noted that support in paying for premiums must be provided to lower- and middle-income policyholders.

"Some may assess, why should we differentiate premiums between men and women if we say CareShield Life is an inclusive scheme? While we have designed CareShield Life to be inclusive, on balance, it is equally important for the scheme to be equitable and sustainable, and avoid adverse selection. To that end, premiums must be actuarially sound."

[related_story]

This U.S.-centric article shows further that discretionary pricing for women isn't a thing limited to Singapore alone, too.

Enter former Nominated Member of Parliament Calvin Cheng.

Cheng, who speaks up on a number of sociopolitical issues in Singapore regularly on his social media, said he actually wouldn't mind subsidising the higher cost of insurance for females under the CareShield Life scheme.

He explains that equalising premiums between men and women actually means that men will be paying more in order for women to pay less — for the reasons stated above.

Cheng acknowledges that the fact that this is a national, compulsory-for-all insurance scheme, however, does make valid the argument that premiums should be made the same between men and women.

In light of this, he feels that perhaps the government can offer this as a choice to Singaporeans — to find out if Singaporean men don't mind paying a bit more so that women can pay a bit less, resulting in equal premiums for all.

Personally, he says he doesn't mind — nor, he reckons, will most Singaporean men.

If you're a Singaporean man, would you?

You can read his post here:

Top photo: Screenshot from CareShield Life YouTube video