$22,000 to have a baby

That's with insurance:

Birthing our daughter was so expensive precisely because we were insured, on the individual market. Our insurer, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, sold us exactly the type of flawed policy—riddled with holes and exceptions—that the health care reform bills in Congress should try to do away with. The “maternity” coverage we purchased didn’t cover my labor, delivery, or hospital stay. It was a sham. And so we spent the first months of her life getting the kind of hospital bills and increasingly aggressive calls from hospital administrators that I once believed were only possible without insurance.

Andrew reacts:

Those are the perils of the current insurance market, and in the Beltway rush to spin the healthcare battle in terms of the fate of Obama's presidency, we forget that even a minimal bill would end this kind of nightmare. And that's a good thing, if we can find a way to afford it.

I would agree people need to know what they're getting. That's why I like the idea of health-insurance exchanges, where the various plans companies offer could be clearly-defined for the individual market.

But, importantly, I'm not against the existence of plans that don't cover $22,000 of maternity costs. I think it's perfectly reasonable for women who don't want such coverage to pay lower premiums for their insurance, just as the men who use less care pay lower premiums.

Why should the rest of society subsidize everyone's maternity care through higher premiums?

I understand people's desire to help out low-income families with subsidies for universal coverage. That's a tenable position, but it needs to be means-tested. People who can afford to pay $22,000 should pay $22,000, or pay for a plan that covers it.

In sum, the problem remains clearly-defining what various plans cover, so that people know what they're getting and don't get hoodwinked into an individual policy that refuses to pay for what they expect it to pay for. This problem is solvable, and I hope whatever comes out congress works to solve it.

But it needs to do so without mandating that every plan cover some minimum of maternity costs, because that's not something everyone else should have to pay for. For example, if someone makes 100K/yr. and has a baby, it needs to be their responsibility to pay for the proper care--not the rest of society's through the subsidy of forcing all plans to be uniform.