You are required to buy prenatal care because it wasn't fair for young women to have much higher insurance costs then young men just because they get pregnant more often...you know it takes two to tango.
I am happy to pay for prenatal care IF AND WHEN my wife/partner and I decide to have a child. and in that instance, yes I would be paying for prenatal care, however I do not think it is right for the government to force me to purchase ANY SERVICE that I may not want or may not use, such as prenatal care.
Those young women who made the decision to have sex not knowing if the individual they "Tangoed" with would help with any costs or work will soon learn that it was a poor decision. Sheltering the consequences of ones actions is not an affective way to direct behavior for the masses. That young girls friends will see that it was hell, and their parents will learn it was an expensive decision, and then those other girls and their parents will do a better job being responsible citizen. I shouldnt have to pay for coverage that is ultimately needed because of poor parenting.
And yes, with any statistical examination there will be a small percentage of people that statistics work against, IE. the less the 1% of pregnancies due to rape.
And I'd be happy to pay for car insurance IF AND WHEN I get in to an accident in my own car. You don't get an insurance discount for naively believing that you won't make mistakes, or for believing that undesirable things won't happen to you.
I guess the main problem is that pregnancy is considered a health insurance thing at all: it's going to come and birth, like schools, benefits society as a whole. But who pays for it?
If you are a single guy with no kids, do you also complain about property taxes funding public schools? After all you have no kids, you are paying for something you don't use. If you go single or DINK, then it is something you will never use.
Really, this is why I think single payer or just full-on nationalized health would work better in the end. Insurance is just another tax now, and there is no point to put private companies in the middle of it.
Prenatal care like vaccinations more than pay for themselves at the societal level. I can see the argument for keeping the government out of healthcare, but this really does fall under moral hazard.
Also, if a female can go from no prenatal care to prenatal care then there going to swap from one to the other when they decide to have kids which would distort the market. In the end it's the same reason you can't get insurance with and without support for specific diseases.
Unintended pregnancies exist, and people have sex. But you're not going to get pulled over and cited for sexing without a license, because it tends to happen in private. So how should an insurance company verify that someone isn't having sex that could result in an immediate need for prenatal care? What happens when you're allowed to opt out, but your contraceptive fails and you have a kid anyway? The risk of ectopic pregnancies and/or miscarriages is high pretty early on, and many of those present in the ER where it's ludicrously expensive to even breathe the air.
How about diabetes or mental health care, should you be allowed to opt out of that coverage it you're sure™ it's not going to happen to you? Can women opt out of most everything to do with the prostate?
On top of all of this, as another commenter explained, the marginal cost of prenatal/pregnancy/postnatal coverage isn't even all that high. The cost of managing the opt-out would probably destroy any savings you were hoping to realize.
As a female who will never have children, I'm even more angered by the new coverage. Being self-employed, I went from a $5k deductible for around $80/month to a $10k deductible and $230/month (and my new plan doesn't have good coverage all over the country, which sucks because I travel a lot).
I have never used my health insurance for any reason in the last 15 years, I eat well, exercise, get plenty of sleep, etc. - so the whole situation makes me mad every time I see the bill.
