Make Pregnancy Expensive Again: A Woman's Guide to the New Health Bill

Bloomberg -------- Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, women who sought to purchase health insurance regularly confronted some harsh market conditions. Insurance companies in the era before Obamacare often wouldn't underwrite pregnant women or would issue policies that excluded care during pregnancy. Having delivered a child via cesarean section, as more than 1 million women do every year in the U.S., also pushed women into a higher-cost category, or disqualified them altogether. Post-partum depression was considered a pre-existing condition. So was infertility, a history of abnormal pap smears, and in certain states, even sexual assault or domestic violence. By guaranteeing maternity care and making coverage available for people with pre-existing conditions, Obamacare largely did away with the markup on women's health insurance. Critics groused that this shifted the burden unfairly to men and women who didn't plan to have children; in March, for instance, Illinois Representative John Shimkus, a Republican, said one of his primary objections to Obamacare was "men having to purchase prenatal care." To learn more click on the picture below to read the article.