Trump White House Tells Pregnant Women Who Need Health Care To Move or Change Their State Laws

Ladies, if you want maternity care, just move.

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Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s budget director, assumes that we all want to get rid of Obamacare — that thing that gives women free well women visits and demands that maternity care is not a preexisting condition, and if y’all need maternity care, change the law in your state before you get pregnant.

Or move, I guess, since changing laws takes a long time and is by no means certain (for proof of this, I refer to the Republicans trying to do what they promised they would by repealing Obamacare).

Watch Office of Management and Budget Director Mulvaney on CBS This Morning:

Mulvaney said Trumpcare would shift whether or not to cover maternity care to states and if voters don’t like this, they can change their state laws.

Trying to explain why giving states the right to deny essential healthcare services like maternity care is super, Mulvaney said if voters don’t live in a state that requires that insurance companies cover maternity care, they can just try to change their state law.

“They could try to change their own state legislatures and their state laws,” Mulvaney said.

“Why do we look to the federal government to try to fix our local problems? That’s one of the big problems of Obamacare,” Mulvaney continued cluelessly, not realizing that he was explaining why people might want to keep Obamacare and if anything explaining to people why they need the federal government sometimes.

In fact, thanks to Obamacare today all new policies include maternity care, “prior to 2014, most individual plans excluded maternity coverage. Today, all new policies include maternity benefits.”

More, and read closely because this is what Trumpcare will take us back to (my bold):

Prior to 2014, women who purchased their own health insurance were often completely out of luck if they wanted to have coverage for maternity. In 2013, the National Women’s Law Center reported that just 12 percent of individual market plans included maternity benefits. And that was despite the fact that nine states required maternity benefits to be included on all individual plans.

In the rest of the states, maternity coverage in the individual market was extremely rare, and if it did exist, it was generally in the form of an expensive rider that could be added to a plan, usually with a waiting period. Yet even on plans that excluded maternity coverage, women were charged premiums that were at least 30 percent higher than those charged to men for the same coverage.

Before Obamacare made coverage guaranteed issue, pregnancy itself was also considered a pre-existing condition that would prevent an expectant parent — male or female — from obtaining coverage in all but five states. And many individual health insurance carriers considered a previous cesarean section to be a reason to decline an application or charge a higher initial premium.

Trumpcare will take us back to the good old days when women were penalized financially for getting pregnant.

This is no small issue, because maternity costs are outrageous. And maternity costs can vary from state to state by 50% or more according to a Truven report. “A 2014 study by the University of California, San Francisco found that hospital charges for an uncomplicated vaginal delivery ranged from $3,296 to $37,227, depending on the hospital.”

Also, (note this is from 2011 so the insurance info is not up to date), Parents explained, “News flash: Having a baby is expensive. It’s the most costly health event families are likely to experience during their childbearing years. On average, U.S. hospital deliveries cost $3,500 per stay, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. Add in prenatal, delivery-related and post-partum healthcare, and you’re looking at an $8,802 tab, according to a Thomson Healthcare study for March of Dimes.

Mulvaney tried to make the unsubstantiated argument that under Obamacare everyone can afford insurance but no one can afford to go to the doctor, “As a result, you have a system where everybody, just about, can afford to have insurance, but nobody can afford to actually go to the doctor and that’s what we’re trying to fix and that’s what the House bill does.”

Yeah, not sure what kind of insurance Mulvaney has but that’s not true. In fact the insurance purchased under Obamacare is varied and people can pick the tier of coverage they want. To parse this out for Mulvaney, the budget director, we call this the free market. People chose what they want to pay for and that determines what is covered but they do have insurance and under Obamacare, due to its regulations, they are reasonably assured that they will actually get what they pay for, which was not true before Obamacare.

“States not only have the ability to require those services, many of them already do,” Mulvaney offered.

Well okay. What about those states that do not? And that statement is misleading. As quoted above, before Obamacare, just 12 percent of individual plans included maternity benefits despite the fact that nine states required maternity benefits to be included.

Just change your laws or move, ladies.

The party of pro-life is in the House (literally), and they do not care about maternity costs. This might be because a group of men made this decision. Vice President Mike Pence tweeted a picture yesterday of the men discussing maternity care for you.

Vice President Mike Pence, Twitter

Need care? Just move!

Sarah Jones

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