Basic baby health insurance: Doctors call for pregnancy cover

THE AMA says Australia’s high level of unplanned pregnancies makes it ridiculous that health insurance pregnancy cover must be preplanned.

The AMA says pregnancy cover should be standard on private health insurance policies.

OBSTETRIC cover should be standard in private health ­insurance policies to make the system fairer and acknowledge how common unplanned pregnancies were, according to the nation’s biggest doctors group.

The Australian Medical ­Association has questioned why women were forced to pre-plan their health cover to specifically include pregnancy given the high rate of ­unplanned pregnancies.

“Unplanned pregnancy is an extremely likely event. It’s a very important and very common and routine life event, pregnancy cover should be in the majority of policies,” AMA vice president Dr Tony Bartone said. Labor has backed the call.

Doctors argue that pregnancy health cover should be automatic.

The microscope is on private health care policies after the federal Government announced this week it would roll out a simpler system where cover was ranked as gold, silver and bronze. But they are yet to work out the details of what is included in the new schemes.

A spokesman for Health minister Greg Hunt said an ­advisory committee was considering policy inclusions into the new category system.

But he said individual policies are a matter for each person and their insurer.

“Australians shouldn’t get any surprises with their cover and our plan to simplify it through the new Gold, Silver, Bronze and Basic category system will support more ­informed choice.”

More than two million Australians have private health care policies with exclusions that can leave them out of pocket when they end up in hospital but realise their procedure is not covered.

Government figures show that private health patients often end up with more than $2000 out-of-pocket expenses.

“There are a plethora of policies in the market, there’s more than 20,000 different types of policies or more, its ­extremely confusing. You need a PhD to work through it all,” Dr Bartone said.

“They use tricky terminology to confuse and it leaves consumers out of pocket.”

Originally published as Basic baby health insurance: Doctors call for pregnancy cover