For more on how the different genders use health care, it's worth reading this old New Yorker writer showdown between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik on Canada's health system. This is back when Gladwell was further to the right than he is now, and he argues:
the kind of health care that women need up to middle age is, by and large, relatively low tech. It is, by and large, things that we know how to do, and the real critical questions for women are almost always solved by: Have you seen your doctor recently? Are you getting a check-up?
If you look at patterns of mortality for women, and morbidity, there are many, many more things that can go wrong in a 30-year-old woman than there are in a 30-year-old man.
Look at the way that men use the health-care system. They use it not chronically, but acutely. The problems that strike them, strike them well into middle age. A 30-year-old guy does not need to go to the doctor ever unless there is something obviously wrong with him, and, in fact, many 30-year-old men, 40-year-old men do not go to the doctor. And if you look at the reasons why men get sick as opposed to reasons why women get sick, men, up until their 60s, essentially, they either get shot or they die in car accidents. Women do not get shot or die in car accidents. It's actually quite striking. Women die of cancer, or they die of very, very different things until you get up into the late 60s and 70s.[...]
That suggests to me that the ideal health-care system for a man is very different from the ideal health-care system for a woman. In fact, what a man wants from a health-care system is a health-care system that is acutely oriented, not chronically oriented, that is much more interested in quality of care, much less interested in access. A man doesn't need access to care until he's very old. He wants a high end, super-specialized system that when he has something seriously wrong with him fixes it right away. A woman, on the other hand, wants a system that's low tech, that sacrifices quality for a kind of presence. She can go to the doctor three times a month if she wants to and get a personal relationship with that doctor.
This is obviously wrong in some senses. For instance, women certainly don't want low-tech care for breast cancer, or premature children, or a variety of other maladies. But on a day-to-day basis, there's some truth to Gladwell's claim.
