alt Hacker News1. I mentioned, in multiple places, that this is the cheapest PPO offered to me through a limited selection of potential brokers / marketplaces - and that's important because it covers our current health care providers AND child birth as a benefit.
2. If we weren't trying to have kids, our options for purchasing health insurance expand drastically. Individual marketplace plans become a viable, for instance, since the "not covering childbirth" issue goes away. I mention the short-comings of the individual health insurance marketplace at least twice in this regard, including a big pull quote explaining the ACA work-around with child birth coverage.
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What exactly does covering childbirth mean? We've had two children now and it's not something I've considered when choosing insurance (my company's vs my wife's), so maybe we just got lucky. Is there anything different about child birth vs simply in-network hospital coverage? I assumed we'd just hit our out-of-pocket max.
> If we weren't trying to have kids, our options for purchasing health insurance expand drastically.
Yes, but crucially none of those expanded options cost $0, so I still don't understand your math at all. I feel like we're talking in circles here.
You should be deducting a substantially non-zero number from the amount in the headline to account for your "normal" non-childbirth-year best-case medical insurance premiums (or out-of-pocket cash costs if foregoing insurance altogether).