Choices, Choices! New Baby or Health Insurance?

October 17, 2009 by Cathy Ribble
Filed under: News

The health care debate continues in Washington while families face stark choices

Some women in the United States are forced to make a choice between having a baby or paying for health insurance. Families are struggling with very difficult choices as the healthcare debate continues in Washington.

ABC’s Tom Shine reports that Peggy Robertson ran into problems when she was shopping for more affordable health insurance for her family. Her husband is self-employed, and she has two young boys. Robertson was shocked when the Golden Rule Insurance Company denied the family coverage due to her C-section when he son Luke was born in 2006. “I called Golden Rule and they said that if I would get sterilized, they would then be able to offer insurance to me.”

Amanda Buchanan’s family also faced difficult choices concerning health insurance. Her husband hired on as a teacher for a rural school at a salary of $33,000 a year. It would cost the family $760 a month to cover the entire family under the school’s group health insurance policy.

That was a huge chunk of change out of her family budget, so Amanda went shopping for an individual policy to cover just her and her son. The policy Amanda found for $280 a month carried a maternity deductible of $5,000. At the time they were not planning to have another child. A few months later, things canged and they contemplated having a second baby. Amanda became angry that her insurance company seemed to be discouraging the addition to their family. She felt like the insurance company was forcing her to pay basically the entire cost if she had a typical pregnancy.

Amanda and her husband decided to have a baby, and then planned to take Amanda off of the insurance. The money they saved would be used to pay down their medical debt. They thought they had arrived at a plan that would allow them to have another baby. The couple was in for a rude awakening though when their second child was born. Even though the hospital agreed to write off their bill, the medical expenses from the pregnancy and delivery “ate up 28 percent of our net income in 2008,” according to Buchanan.