I Can’t Get Pregnant

Not that I have any desire to have kids right now. The closest I want to come to having children is to babysit my adorable nephew for a couple hours and then return him to his parents, stat.

The reason I can’t have kids right now relates entirely to insurance. Since I left my last job, I opted not to go with COBRA but instead opted to go with an independent insurance option, specifically Kaiser Permanente. As I was looking at my options, I was surprised to see prenatal care wasn’t covered. No matter what plan I looked at, prenatal wasn’t covered.

I thought it was a Kaiser practice, until I saw this article floating around Twitter – “Being A Woman Is Not A Pre-Existing Condition.” To my astonishment, only 12 percent of individual market plans include comprehensive maternity coverage. I’m not pregnant now, so I don’t see how insurance companies can preemptively decide they won’t cover this for me moving forward. I don’t think it’s fair to group pregnancy under elective options. Having a baby isn’t exactly on par with having a nose job.

What further infuriates me is that in nearly all cases, it takes TWO to make a baby. Yet this scenario puts all of the financial onus on women. The loopholes of not being covered with a pregnancy loom large. If your company shuts down, you no longer qualify for Cobra. One women had herself induced, so she would give birth before her company shut down, and still get hit with an $18,000 hospital bill. Holy crap. And if you have had a C-Section and live in Colorado, United Health has the right to simply reject you on the spot. It limits options for women to work as entrepreneurs where you are often required to have independent insurance options.

Furthermore, gender rating (a bullshit discriminatory practice) means that women pay more – a lot more – for insurance options. According to The Denver Post,

“Colorado women age 40 and under shopping for health insurance in the individual market, not through an employer, pay from 10 percent to 59 percent more than men, according to analysis by the National Women’s Law Center.”

I don’t want children now (and maybe ever) but discriminatory laws that limit the prenatal care and thus health of this country’s babies deserves everyone’s wrath. I’ll be damned if insurance companies run almost entirely by men get to determine if I can have kids someday.