Being pregnant is not meant to be simple. Being pregnant without health coverage is significantly harder. The frustrating thing is that no woman wants to go uninsured if she has a choice about it, and often women become pregnant by accident, so the fair conclusion would be that health insurance companies would be tolerant of uninsured pregnant women.

That is not the case.

In reality Obtaining insurance for pregnant women is hard. Why? The ‘formal’ explanation is because the pregnancy is treated as a preexisting condition, a reason that causes many people to struggle to obtain health coverage (for example, if someone has Cancer, getting health insurance and does not possess insurance might prove to be virtually impossible as well).

On one hand, it is easy to understand the insurance company’s perspective: nine months of pregnancy can cost quite a lot: visits to the physician, standard screenings, the possibility of complications and not to mention the delivery itself. However, pregnancy is a natural fact of life, and in this day and age we should expect that there be regulations helping women obtain health coverage if they discover they are pregnant and are uninsured.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case – there is no federal law requiring health insurance providers to help women in this situation. Many women would not even request for a low cost medical insurance but would compromise for whatever they can get – but alas, even that is not a trivial task.

The good news is that there are multiple programs that offer maternity insurance for women, as well as programs that are insurance-like (which cover the entire pregnancy and delivery) – basically, these are sufficient.

In our site, The Guide to Health, we provide several articles that elaborate on the alternatives available for women in this condition as well as offer links to one such a program. Hopefully, you, the reader, are not uninsured and pregnant – but if you are, this site can really help you.