health insurance for the natural health minded?

[bluedaisy]

For all of you who have a healthy lifestyle and are natural health oriented, what do you do for health insurance (in the US)?

I am so frustrated with health care...we eat healthy, live a healthy lifestyle, only go to the dr when absolutely necessary, try to avoid drugs in favor of natural healing, we have no chronic health problems, and no long term prescriptions.

My husband and I spent $2500 on premiums last year and we each went to the dr once - our total health expenditure was less than $200.

Now we're looking at adding maternity and the rates are unbeleivable - I'm assuming they are so high because 30% of women have c sections and most of the rest have high intervention hospital births. we want to have a home birth, which costs around $2500. In order to afford maternity, we would have to have high deductible which means we'd end up paying for the whole thing out of pocket anyway, plus we would have to pay the additional premuims so we'd end up spending more than $4000 for a $2500 homebirth. we're not comfortable not havnig any maternity coverage because you just never know if the baby will be premature of if there will be complications.

What do you do for health insurance if you don't use mainstream medicine very much? are there any alternatives for more naturally minded insurance companies?

[kjbrown92]

Not that I know of. I've been thinking the same thing. We pay a lot for the coverage we have, and it doesn't include any of our supplements, or any homeopathy (which I'd like to try but don't have the money for right now) or the osteopath, whom I'm love, or many of the tests we've had to get done over the last couple of years. We keep the coverage though, just in case. I see it as more for catastrophic stuff than for every day stuff.

[gcgirl]

Yeah, right! *dripping sarcasm*

I bet we won't be seeing it anytime soon, either. It's a shame.

[tanyalynn]

I don't know of a good solution either. If we didn't have employer-based health insurance (which doesn't cover most of the health costs we incur), I think we'd choose a high deductible policy, the cheapest we could get--which probably wouldn't be very cheap. But I don't know what to do about maternity coverage--I may actually take the risk and not have actual maternity coverage and just pay for a HB with cash. I've never had complications during pregnancy, I'm sure that colors my guess as to what I'd do, but the cost is nuts given the low likelihood (in my case) of needing it.

No good solutions, and I don't know any way to improve the situation.

[tinuviel_k]

My insurance (Uniform Medical) through my husband's job has actually been pretty good as far as my natural health tendencies go.

My midwife attended home birth was covered. I can get a certain number of acupuncture, chiropractic work, and massage each year, all with a very small co-pay of $7. My naturopathic Dr was covered, as is the holistic MD that I see now.

[kjbrown92]

We have a high deductible plan and an HSA, so I just use the HSA money (pre-tax) to pay for the non-covered osteopath and tests. That's the only solution that I've found.

[mamafish9]

Read the fine print of your insurance policy. It varies by state and by insurer, but many that don't cover maternity, will still cover "complications from a birth". In other words, they won't pay for you to go to the hospital (or midwife, or homebirth) and have a nice, routine delivery. But if something goes wrong, and you're dealing with an emergency (C-section, or post birth issues for mama or babe), those are sometimes covered. We found a policy that did (high deductible), paid for our home birth out of pocket, but knew we had coverage if we ended up with a baby in the NICU, or something like that (which is insanely expensive).

Note that if you're buying individual insurance, you need to get it in place before you get pregnant - pretty much none of them will cover you (even if they don't cover maternity) when you're already pregnant.