on insurance

I follow a fellow VBACer's blog (http://thefeministbreeder.com/) and she posted the other day about her insurance woes which got me thinking about my issues with insurance.

Her story in a nutshell is that her insurance plan changed and now doesn't cover her homebirth like she thought it would and she can't afford the thousands of dollars OOP that it would cost for a homebirth. Totally understandable and I can relate to how she feels.

When H got his new job we fully understood that the new job did not come with insurance (which was provided at 100% with his old job). We planned to get private insurance, but when I called to apply, I was told only one company in this state will provide maternity coverage. Well, we weren't planning on having any more kids, but I wanted to know that we had insurance just in case because I didn't want to take the risk of a huge bill if I ended up with another c/s if we got pregnant again. We knew then that if we had another baby, he/she would be born at home, but I just wanted the back-up since V's birth was well over $100k.

Well, the only company that offers maternity insurance in Oklahoma won't cover a woman with a prior cesarean, even if she has had a vaginal birth after the c/s. Totally sucks. So that left us with the option of no maternity coverage or going through my dad's business to get insurance since I work there for him one day a week. We applied for the private insurance, but V got denied completely because his medical records show that he "might have XYZ" but then says later that he does not and apparently the insurance company can't read and didn't realize it said he didn't have that (which, BTW, I had never even heard of). I was also denied anything relating to uterine surgery because of my cesarean. Well, V can't just not have insurance so we "chose" the group policy. Since it was FIVE TIMES more for insurance with the group policy than we would have with the private, for less coverage and higher co-pays, we decided we would just have that until we got the mess with the private company figured out. Well, in that time, I got pregnant so our whole family got denied coverage.

So, then we actually contemplated working the system a bit and getting legally separated so that the kids and I could be covered by the state and we would just pay for private insurance for H. Our homebirth would still not be covered, but at least we wouldn't have to pay thousands of dollars in the off chance that I ended up in a hospital, on top of the premiums we are paying for the insurance.

We decided that wasn't the right thing to do, and then found out it wouldn't work anyway because H can't get private insurance if he is expecting a child. (We found that out when we realized it would be cheaper monthly to get H and the kids private insurance and I just keep the group policy--no insurance company will do that since H is expecting a child).

So in the end, I feel like we are paying a crapton of money for insurance that we can't even use (won't cover the homebirth in network and out out of network deductible is way higher than the homebirth, plus we get a discount for not running it through insurance). I am thankful that we have the funds to pay for our birth (with cutting out other things), but it still pisses me off.

And then I think about the women who don't have the option of a group policy at all or don't have the money to pay for the birth (which is not cheap--it is costing us more than my other 2 births). I feel like the insurance companies are dictating how many children a woman can have. I mean if my dad didn't own a business that I worked for, we would be screwed. No insurance, no coverage for any of us, nothing. How many other families are in that situation? It really sucks, and I feel like there isn't a whole lot we can do about it. We need them and they know it.