Being pregnant is not meant to be easy. Being pregnant without health insurance is significantly harder. The frustrating thing is that no woman wants to be uninsured if they have a choice about it, and often women become pregnant unintentionally, so the fair conclusion would be that insurance companies would be supportive of uninsured pregnant women.
That is not the case.
In reality Getting insurance for pregnant women is hard. Why? The ‘formal’ reason is because the pregnancy is treated as a pre-existing condition, a reason that causes many people to struggle to get health coverage (for example, if someone has Alzheimer, getting health coverage and does not possess insurance might prove to be very hard as well).
On one hand, it is easy to understand the health provider’s view point: nine months of pregnancy can cost quite a fortune: visits to the physician, standard screenings, the risk of complications and not to mention the delivery itself. However, pregnancy is a natural fact of life, and in this day and age we should expect that there be laws helping women obtain health coverage if they discover they are pregnant and are uninsured.
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 compromise 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 coverage for women, as well as programs that are insurance-like (which cover the entire pregnancy and delivery) – essentially, these are sufficient.
In our site, The Guide to Health, we offer a couple of articles that explain the alternatives available for women in this situation as well as offer links to one such a program. Hopefully, you, the reader, are not uninsured and pregnant – but if you are, this site can really help you.