Individual Health Insurance and Pregnancy:How can you find a way to get insurance coverage to help pay the costs to having a baby? Careful planning is necessary to help limit your financial exposure for this joyous event. If you can plan this event, this would be the best way to go to maximize your coverage. I would recommend consulting with your insurance agent about your options. I will share how we work with our clients when they are ready to start a family.

The customers I talk with come to me for help in one of the three situations:

1.Preparing to have a baby – looking for ways to minimize cost

2.Pregnant now with Individual Health Insurance that does not cover maternity

3.Pregnant with No health coverage – What do I do?

I will share my approach to the customers in this situation.

 

Preparing of Pregnancy – Review Your Current Health Coverage

The best way is to ensure you have an individual insurance policy in place before you become pregnant. This may not cover costs associated with pregnancy, but will give you protection for a complication with pregnancy. If you take time to discuss with us we will suggest plans in your area that can offer enhanced coverage for pregnancy. We have a few products that will cover pregnancy and some that will offer the prenegotiated rates for the insurance company and a maternity deductible. This approach will have some cost savings for the client.

I am Pregnant Now with Individual Health Insurance that does not cover maternity

If you are prepared and do have health insurance in place and do find out that you are expecting, then we have some suggestions to help reduce your out of pocket expense. We typically recommend in the first trimester to prepay/negotiate the costs with the doctor and hospital. We have seen prepaying can offer substantial savings. When you are pregnant, you cannot change health insurance companies as you not have an un-insurable condition. This mean you and your spouse will be denied when applying for health insurance due to the fact that you expecting a baby. Maybe President Obama will fix this problem with the health insurance changes. You will need to keep you existing policy to cover you for any complications with the pregnancy.

If you are in this situation where you do not have maternity coverage, you could be looking at a medical bill $8,000 to $17,000 depending on geographic location. This can be negotiated some and prepaying helps as well. I usually recommend a guarantee issue product along with your current health insurance plan that is an indemnity plan that will pay a set dollar amount for an event. This plan I have been recommending has no preexisting condition waiting period, so you can add this plan when you will need it. The highest end plan has a couple of benefits that will help offset some of your expenses. It will pay a $1,000 on hospital admission, and $1,000 a day for hospital confinement benefit. If you stayed in the hospital for 3 days, they would pay you $4,000 benefit. This would help pay a good portion of the costs. You can view the benefits of this plan from Homeland HealthCare. Call us with any questions.

I am Pregnant with No Health Insurance

I talk to customer in this situation every day. They just found out they are pregnant and do not have any health coverage and they are looking for help. I listen to their situation and try to offer suggestions to them. If they are in a place in life where they are not earning much money, they could be eligible for Medicaid to help them with their pregnancy. This may be a good option for some to get the coverage they need and make this very affordable for them, and let them focus on have a healthy baby.

For others, they are earning too much and they are trying to decide how to handle this from a financial perspective. I would still recommend the guarantee issue product for them to help offset the costs. The plan does have some benefit for doctors visits, 5 per year and they will pay $75 for each visit and the above mentioned benefits. This may provide some relief to those that have been surprised by pregnancy. This plan will even pay some benefit for newborns in the first 30 days. You can see the benefits of the Homeland HealthCare Product. Call us with any questions.

Final Thought

Your Pregnant and need advice, talk with us or your insurance agent about your options. This should provide you some advice to help you relax and focus on being healthy. Sometimes your insurance agent does not have the answer you want to hear, but they should be a trusted source for you to help you navigate health insurance options through your pregnancy.We are here to help you.