Being Pregnant and Uninsured: The Difficulties
Being pregnant is not meant to be easy. Being pregnant without health coverage is significantly more problematic. The frustrating thing is that no woman wants to go uninsured if they have a choice about it, and often women become pregnant unintentionally, so the fair conclusion should be that insurance companies would be supportive of uninsured pregnant women.
That is not the case.
In reality Obtaining insurance for pregnant women is problematic. Why? The ‘formal’ reason is because the pregnancy is treated as a preexisting condition, a reason that causes a lot of people to struggle to obtain health coverage (for example, if someone has AIDS, getting health insurance and does not possess insurance might prove to be very hard as well).
On one hand, it is possible to understand the insurance company’s perspective: nine months of pregnancy can cost quite a fortune: visits to the doctor, standard screenings, the risk of complications and not to mention the delivery of the baby itself. However, pregnancy is a natural condition, and in this day and age we should expect that there be regulations helping women obtain health coverage if they discover they are pregnant and do not possess health insurance.
Unfortunately, this is not the case - there is no federal law requiring health insurance providers to assist women in this situation. Many women would not even ask for a low cost medical insurance but would settle for whatever they can get - but alas, even that is not a trivial task.
The good news is that there are several programs that offer maternity insurance for women, as well as programs that are insurance-like (which cover the entire pregnancy and delivery) - essentially, these are good enough.
In our site, The Guide to Health, we offer several articles that elaborate on the alternatives available for women in this condition as well as offer links to one such a program. Hopefully, you, the reader, possess health insurance and pregnant - but if you are, this site can really help you.