Maternity insurance is covered by some health care policies and not others, depending on the insurance provider. Sometimes, this kind of insurance is an option, and has to be added for an additional cost. Women should consider this coverage carefully, even if they aren’t pregnant. If they plan to have a baby in the future, getting coverage now will be easier than trying to get covered when they’re already pregnant.

From an insurance standpoint, pregnancy is much like a pre-existing health condition. If you don’t have it, your insurance is lower. If you do have it, your insurance is higher – if you can get coverage at all. Waiting until you’re pregnant to get maternity insurance is a bad (and expensive) choice. Instead, any woman who’s working or who is covered under her husband’s insurance plan should find out whether she has coverage for maternity insurance. If she does not, she should investigate to see if it can be added to the current plan, and at what cost.

Some insurance plans simply don’t offer maternity insurance coverage at all. If a woman doesn’t have the option to get maternity insurance through her current plan, she should shop for a secondary plan that offers it. That may be more expensive than just adding it to her existing insurance, but it’s still a less expensive option than having a baby with no insurance.

Prenatal care and hospital stays cost thousands of dollars, even for an easy pregnancy and birth with no complications. If there are problems, tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills can quickly pile up and bankrupt a family. No one wants to deal with that on top of a new baby, and most people today don’t have the kind of income and savings accounts to pay those bills. Avoiding those types of expenses is the only realistic way to stay safe, financially, and that can only come through insurance.

If a woman has a particular doctor she would like to use when she does get pregnant, finding out which insurance plans that doctor takes should be the first step toward getting a good maternity insurance plan. If there is no preference for a doctor, then it’s a good idea to see what each potential plan offers, so one with the best coverage options can be selected. Make sure the plan covers enough to be valuable, or there’s really no point in having it.

A good maternity plan should address:

  • Prenatal care – both doctor visits and tests
  • The actual birth of the baby
  • The length of the hospital stay after birth, for both mother and child
  • Complications, such as NICU and other special areas where the baby might have to be kept
  • Complications for the mother, including emergency surgery
  • C-sections (emergency or otherwise)

Be sure the insurance plan that’s being chosen is one that covers nearly every eventuality, in order to protect finances from ruin. A woman should feel safe with her maternity insurance plan, so when she gets pregnant she can enjoy that experience and look forward to the future. Worrying about the cost of everything can dampen that enthusiasm, but a good maternity insurance plan will take care of most everything.