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Comment by WrtCdEvrydy | Hacker News Reader

My favorite one was pregnancy being a pre-existing condition so if your husband got fired (noone would ever fire a pregnant woman for no reason), you couldn't get insurance when you needed it the most.

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"noone would ever fire a pregnant woman for no reason"

Companies do this all the time. My sister worked at a major oil company that laid off all the pregnant women and new moms out on maternity leave within her department. (To be fair, they also laid off about 1/3 of the rest of the company as well.) It's totally illegal, but if you've just been laid off and have a new baby on the way are you really going to have the money or energy to fight a lawsuit? And even if 10% of people affected did, it's cheaper for the company to settle for $500K or so than to pay the salaries of all the people they fired.

I do believe that was unmarked sarcasm, so hazardous in these times.

Though (if both spouses were working & had access to employer sponsored insurance), wouldn't the husband being fired result in a qualifying change for the woman, allowing her to enroll on her employer's insurance plan, thus covering the pregnancy?

Or COBRA, unless you expect your pregnancy to last longer than 18 months.

COBRA these days ends up being way too expensive for most people to afford. Perhaps at one time it was a useful regulation. Now it is pretty unaffordable.

If it was useful, it was a very long time ago. I remember my parents being in between jobs in the late 90’s and early aughts and complaining that COBRA was extremely expensive. The only reason the law seems to exist anymore is for people who somehow have some expensive debilitating condition yet can still work (or are a worker covering a family member with such condition). And that’s a pretty small subset of all health insurance buyers.

Data seems to agree: in 2007 the usage of COBRA was 10%: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/01/23/cobra.health.insurance/

I thought COBRA was exceedingly expensive in 2000. Now, the cheapest HMO Bronze plan is 300% more, adjusting for inflation.

Unless her employer's insurance plan excluded her based on the pre-existing condition of being pregnant. (which it certainly could have)

The point of trying to get on an employer's insurance plans were that people were not excluded for pre-existing conditions because the employer plans were less selective (and also correspondingly more expensive, though the employer contributions hid the additional expense from the employees).

Why would you expect people to want to open their own wallet to pay for your pregnancy-related medical expenses in exchange for premiums that are much smaller than the expenses you already know you're going to incur?

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