Healthcare Reform and Birth Options?

[micah_mae_]

How will this health care reform affect home birth? Birth center birth? Midwife attended births? Prenatal care? Etc? If at all?

Thanks

[khaoskat]

No clue, but I think with a huge part of the reform being a cut in costs of procedures, I think we can expect to see some major changes and not all of them for the good.

I see a few positives in the reform, but I also see negatives.

I think no one knows for sure what is going to happen, but I think we can expect to see some major cuts and very soon in the hear future.

I know right now, for my family to purchase the required insurance, it will take over 1/2 of our yearly income before taxes. Figure in taxes, and we will barely bring home enough to pay our rent/mortgage, property taxes, and home owners insurance.

So, when you figure the 2% tax penalty we are better off not buying the insurance and just paying the tax penalty every year, it would save us a significant amount of money.

[RedOakMomma]

For me, if this legislation had been in effect when I first got pregnant, it would have made a great deal of difference for me. I was newly out of school, had to drop off my parents' insurance, and buy my own policy. Since I got pregnant just before the policy went into effect, it was a pre-existing condition and my policy wouldn't cover it...which became a big $$ issue when my pregnancy became high-needs. I had to get married in order to get coverage. Big life choice for something so simple, yk?

Under this reform, I still could have been on my parents' insurance. I also couldn't have been kicked off my new policy for getting pregnant in the 2.5 weeks when my coverage lapsed.

[Hannah32]

One of the provisions in the bill is that healthcare premium contributions cannot exceed something like 9% of income. I've been paying attention to that part especially, because my family pays something approaching 20% of our gross income in premiums and I'm eager to see that decrease, eventually.....

[GoldmanBaby09]

Here is a link from My Best Birth talking about some of the reform issues regarding birth: http://www.mybestbirth.com/forum/top...-mama-campaign. I'm happy about the increased access to birth center births with coverage from Medicaid.