Last Thursday, more than 50 House Democrats and more than 30 national advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood sent letters to the Department of Health and Human Services, urging the Obama administration to classify pregnancy as a “qualifying life event” under the Affordable Care Act. 

A qualifying life event is when something major happens in one’s life, like a change in family size, such as giving birth or getting married, that allows an enrollment period to open up to sign up for health care. Currently, if a woman is pregnant and uninsured, critical prenatal care is not covered in any way by the government. This is a major issue because prenatal care is vital for the healthy birth of a healthy child. This care includes making sure the woman knows about essential nutrition information, like getting enough folic acid, and getting images of the fetus to make sure it is developing on track. The way the system works is that there can be qualifying life events that can open up an enrollment period for people to sign up for health care from HealthCare.gov. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, people who oppose creating a special enrollment period for when women become pregnant say that this will encourage young women not to get health care until they become pregnant. Basically, women would be incentivized to only seek care when they need it and won’t pay into the system of health care until they are too expensive to take care of. Many young people opt out of buying insurance because young adults are generally healthy and can forgo going to the doctor while maintaining a healthy status. 

But even if this were the case, it would still cost a ton of money to force so many women to forgo prenatal care if they can’t afford it because doing so leads to worse birth outcomes, including low birth weight and premature babies, caesarian sections that may have been prevented and some birth defects that could have been lessened by the correct prenatal care.

This is so important in the United States because the infant mortality rate here is high compared to other developed countries with the lowest infant mortality rates.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2010 the infant mortality rate in the United States was 6.10 per 1,000 births compared to 2.3 in Finland and Japan, 2.5 in Portugal and Sweden and 2.7 in the Czech Republic. 

Prenatal care is covered in many of these countries, and there is also better established overall health care. 

Additionally, infant mortality rates only declined from 6.91 in 2000 to 6.05 in 2011, according to the CDC. So why is the infant mortality rate so high in the United States?

There are many factors that contribute to increased infant mortality rates, such as socioeconomic status, marital status, age of the woman at time of birth, giving birth to multiples and, most important to this article, prenatal care. However, when people are prevented from receiving this care, they are more likely to have worse birth outcomes. When you look at the differences in infant mortality rate by race, you can see a huge gap in the United States. 

According to the CDC, in 2011, the infant mortality rate of the non-Hispanic black population was 13.31, compared to a 5.63 infant mortality rate in the non-Hispanic white population. There are also socioeconomic connections to the racial disparity seen in the infant mortality rate. Allowing pregnant women to enroll in health care coverage for prenatal care would hopefully lead to not just overall lower infant mortality rates but also a smaller gap between infant mortality rates divided by race.

Although covering prenatal care could be expensive, it would save a lot of money in the long term and would also lead to healthier and happier babies. For example, at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, it costs $4,370.50 to $6,012.50 for one day in the neonatal intensive care unit. That is a ton of money when you consider that most babies in the NICU spend more than one day there, but it depends on the baby. 

Usually an insurance company or Medicaid will cover all or part of this bill, but sometimes the financial burden ends up falling on the parents. Preventing visits to the NICU is just one way that expanding access to prenatal care would help lower overall costs to mothers and both private and public insurance systems. 

Withholding access to prenatal care is not fair to expecting mothers. It creates more complications and higher health costs to them in the long run. Additionally, it is putting unborn babies at risk of unnecessary complications and even death. 

The Obama Administration should include being pregnant as a qualifying life event and should open an enrollment period for uninsured pregnant women to access health care during this critical time of fetal development.