Can you get Health Insurance for Expectant Fathers

Health insurance companies have a way of declining an application when that person really would like to purchase a plan and they think there is no reason for them to be declined.  One of the recent examples of this is an expectant dad.  Unfortunately for him non of the "A" rated companies will approve a male whose is expecting a baby.  This doesn't matter if he is married to the mother or not.

When I first got into the business years ago this didn't make any sense to me.  Why should a guy not be able to get health insurance for himself just because he is going to be a dad now?  I had this question asked many times and I to also wondered why this was the case.

Most individual health insurance plans don't cover maternity and the ones that do will have this as a rider or an option.  This makes sense that you wouldn't be able to have maternity coverage added on after the fact.  But really what is comes down to is complicated pregnancies.  By law, at least in Illinois an individual health insurance plan is obligated to cover complicated pregnancies whether you have the maternity rider/coverage or not.  The other big factor is that the individual plans will allow you to add on a dependent with out going through underwriting and with out excluding pre-existing conditions.

Worst case scenario that the insurance companies are trying to keep from happening is that someone finds out that will probably be having a complicated pregnancy and apply for coverage.  If they didn't decline someone for being an expectant father in this case now they are going to cover the pregnancy and possibly any future complications with the child.  Since they do not single out an individual during the rate increases, they can't try to recoup the costs.  On the other hand if lets say the mother put the claims through her group policy, the group can see a large rate increase at renewal based on the claims that they incurred.