Someone recently asked the question if the new health reform law covering adult children to age 26 requires that these children be covered for maternity benefits. The answer is no and generally speaking dependent children are not covered for maternity benefits under policies today…no doubt there are exceptions (possibly in California).
This question and the issue raise an interesting point. Let’s put it this way, what other insurance pays you if you decide to incur the risk and resulting cost of something covered by the policy on totally voluntary basis, you know like you need a new car so you smack yours into a tree…wearing your seat belt of course? The answer is there is none. So why do we call health “insurance,” insurance?
In a logical world, you would not have insurance to pay for delivery of a baby, you would save until you could afford it or you would take a loan (or maybe you would give birth in the potato field and then get back to work), like when you voluntarily buy a new car. Of course, we are not logical and who thinks of the cost when having a baby anyway, there are more important things to worry about. Who thinks of the cost indeed, at least until they get to college age. Hey, there is an idea for a new insurance product.
Today, many people cannot afford to have a baby without health “insurance” but is that because of the existence of the insurance in the first place? In 1970 when our first child was born, the OB’s bill was $350. If you apply inflation to that number to 2010, the bill today should be $1968. In reality, you will be lucky to find a fee less than $3,000 and in some parts of the country that is at the low end of the range.
Would a fee of several thousand dollars be feasible if people paid their own bill? We will never know because we all have health insurance now. Umm, I wonder, could pregnancy be a pre-existing condition? No matter we no longer have that to worry about either.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
So true, it used to be almost free to have a baby not look at the cost, What next will we have to pay for the sperm? Well some people do… We here about people buying and selling children, seems like we pay out the nose to by a child now or is that called give birth.
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I think you have a real point here. I, like my parents, and THEIR parents, had only ONE child, for the simple reason that (this would seem to be BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS!) children are expensive to have, and to raise. Of course, what expense is there, when society at large (the taxpayer) pays the bill for prenatal care, delivery, and then the child’s health care (in most states like NY)? AND, free food, if you know how to play the system. Near as I can tell, the only folks that pay for their kids are the wealthy; for everyone else, the cost is – I think the term is ‘AMORTIZED”? This is done, of course, for humanitarian reasons. Never mind the fact that we now have generations of citizens who have been born and have their children at someone else’s expense, and think that’s the way it SHOULD BE! In the meantime, those of us who know better, RESTRAINED ourselves from having more kids than WE (not SOCIETY) could afford.
Talk about irresponsible! IS there such a thing as MASS STUPIDITY?
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