by the right. Sadly most of these young men will eventually want to settle down and have a family and are not thinking that insurance spreads the risk so they won't be footing the whole bill themselves.
This is from the LATimes
Let's examine why maternity care is written into all insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act. The reasons fall into three categories. In ascending order of importance, they are:
1. It takes two to tango. It's true, as Ellers observed, no man has ever given birth to a baby. It's also true that no baby has ever been born without a man being involved somewhere along the line. Limit maternity coverage only to women of childbearing age, and you're giving many of these guys a free pass.
2. Society has a vested interest in healthy babies and mothers. And that's all society, because unhealthy babies and mothers impose a cost on everybody -- in the expense of caring for them as wards of the public, and in the waste of social resources that comes from children unable to reach their full potential as members of society because of injuries or illnesses caused by poor prenatal and postnatal health.
Child mortality rates are among the most important indicators of a nation's overall health profile, and the U.S. rate stinks compared with the rest of the industrialized world's -- at 7 deaths of children under age 5 per 1,000 live births, it's worse than Israel's, South Korea's, Japan's and every Western European nation's. That's why maternity and newborn care and pediatric services are among the 10 health benefits that Obamacare requires to be part of every health plan.
Some of these benefits are so important, they're required to be among the free benefits of catastrophic health plans that may be sold to individuals under the age of 30. They include anemia screening for pregnant women and folic acid supplements for women of childbearing age.
The most important reason is this one:
3. Universal coverage is the only way to make maternity coverage affordable.
Up to now -- before Obamacare's rules kick in Jan. 1 -- only 12% of policies in the individual insurance market offered maternity coverage. Those that offered the coverage often did so as separate riders imposing huge deductibles for maternity care alone -- $5,000 for maternity services, according to a 2010 survey by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and limits on benefits of only a few thousand dollars. The cost of maternity and newborn care is the principal reason that, pre-Obamacare, women were systematically charged more for health insurance than men.
Because insurers pitched maternity coverage in the indivdual market only to buyers of chilbearing age, the premiums were high and they still made almost no money on them. One company internal memo reviewed by the committee stated that its loss on maternity riders came to 90% of income, a money-losing ratio," the memo said.
More at http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-pregnancy-20131101,0,5148721.story#axzz2l95dk9wD
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