Insurance policies

Alright, I'm not quite sure where this goes, but I'm putting it in here. It's potentially an asking advice thing, but also just a mini-rant.

I've recently been looking into private health insurance. I'm not going to have a job for a couple of months, and even if I get one, I'm not holding out that I'll get one that actually offers insurance. I'm currently covered in Japan under the national health insurance, and it's a pretty darn good plan. Granted, Japan is also awesome in that certain diseases are automatically paid for by the government, so I've got a friend here with MS (one of the most expensive diseases) and as long as he's here, his treatment will be covered.

Anyway, that's not really all that important, but just setting up where I'm coming from. I'm looking for just a basic plan for when I return. Something so that if I get sick with bronchitis again like I did last time I returned for Christmas I'm not having to pay 200 dollars on the doctor's visit alone. Now, I know there's a bit of a logical fallacy there anyway considering insurance would require me to pay much more than that over the course of a year, and if that was the only thing I had to pay related to an illness I'm actually out more by paying for insurance, but I guess the way I see it is that if I'm paying for insurance, I'd like to not also have to pay full price on doctor's visits. Seems logical to me.

Well, there are a couple of things I've noticed. One is that it seems like an awful lot of private policies have simply ridiculous deductibles. Like in the thousands of dollars range, some as high as ten. Now, am I understanding right that what that means is that insurance won't pay anything until I hit that 10k mark? Because that is a hell of a lot of money. I'm also noticing that these are the more affordable plans, which basically means that the poorest people who can't afford a higher plan would be buying health insurance that only kicks in if they've had to spend thousands of dollars (that they probably don't have) first. Does that seem right to anyone? Or am I just missing the logic here?

The second thing I've noticed, and the one that really frustrates me, is that almost every single plan out there excludes maternity care. To me, it seems that this should be one of the main things on a simply human level that should be covered. A woman and her child need to receive good prenatal and maternity care in order to ensure a safe, healthy birth for both parties.

America has one of the highest rates of maternal problems and such of the developed world. And here I look at this and can't help but think, "Okay, this is partly why." A lot of studies on the topic discuss how it's the poor people who can't afford care who are suffering the consequences, but this search has proven that even if you could afford health insurance, you still aren't covered! What the frak!?

I want to have kids. Does this mean that if I get a health insurance plan on my own I'm just going to have to pay for all of that by myself? Or risk not receiving the same level of care as someone else simply because my insurance doesn't cover it? I've never heard of an employer's plan doing this. My parents have been on a couple, my current one includes everything. Is this normal? Or again, am I missing something? It seems to me that something this important should be an automatic inclusion in plans, or at the very least that it should be the norm and then women can opt out or choose a plan that doesn't offer it if they don't intend to have children. The snarky part of me also wants to say, "If you aren't going to give that coverage, you'd damn well better pay costs for birth control pills."

Rantish thing over. Anyway, feel free to offer thoughts, or disagreements or explain what I'm missing the picture on here. And if anyone has any suggestions on what to do, I'm all ears. I really want health insurance. I had pneumonia for six weeks once, and I remember being terrified of going to the emergency room because I knew they'd admit me and I didn't have insurance and couldn't afford the bills. It's bad when you're going to bed honestly not certain on whether you're going to wake up in the morning just because you know you can't afford care.

See, things like this make me wish even more for a single-payer system.

What gets me most is the sheer injustice of this. The people who's employers pay for insurance tend to be the ones who are getting paid well in their jobs in the first place. The poor people who are working on the lowest rungs, struggling to put food on the table for their families, aren't going to be as likely to receive insurance through their employers, and so they'd have no choice but to use private. It just seems so wrong to me.

The worst part is that you don't receive the same care when you don't have insurance, either. It doesn't matter if the reason you don't is because you can't afford it or because the only policy you could get is a sucky one that would put you out more money than it's worth (the majority I've seen). Once they see that you don't have insurance, you're not treated the same. My mother works at a hospital and sees it all the time, and I've been without insurance enough to know how it goes.