"Perhaps this is partly because women are more likely to seek preventive care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But this should make them better insurance risks. After all, they're proactively working to stay healthy.

And isn't that exactly what insurers encourage people to do?

"It doesn't make any sense," said Alice Wolfson of United Policyholders, a San Francisco-based advocacy group. "The insurers aren't assessing risk. They're assessing how much healthcare is used, even when it's preventive treatment."

A spokesman for the California Department of Insurance said there were no regulations preventing gender-based pricing for individual policies."

""We've done it because our competitors are doing it," Epstein said. "We don't want to get a disproportionate share of high-risk people."

By "high-risk people," what he means is "women."

And what Epstein is basically saying is that if women are indeed costlier to insure, and if Blue Shield doesn't price its policies accordingly, more women will want to be insured by Blue Shield.

Can't have that."