Being pregnant is never simple. Being pregnant without insurance is significantly harder. The frustrating thing is that no one wants to go uninsured if she has a choice about it, and often women become pregnant by accident, so the fair conclusion should be that health insurance companies would be understanding of uninsured pregnant women.
That is not the case.
In reality Getting insurance for pregnant women is problematic. Why? The ‘formal’ explanation is because the pregnancy is treated as a preexisting condition, a reason that causes a lot of people to struggle to obtain health coverage (i.e. if someone has AIDS, getting health coverage and does not possess insurance might prove to be virtually impossible as well).
On one hand, it is easy to understand the insurance company’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 really should expect that there be laws helping women obtain health insurance if they discover they are pregnant and are uninsured.
Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case – there is no law requiring health insurance providers to help women in this situation. Many women would not even request 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 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 provide 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, are not uninsured and pregnant – but if you are, this site can really help you.