Maternity is a ridiculous thing for insurance to cover, since it's an event entirely under the control of the insured. Similarly, you can't buy life insurance which covers suicide or fire insurance which covers arson committed by you.
Extremely expensive pregnancies are an insurable risk, but standard pregnancy is not.
Brilliant! You're saying we should set up healthcare laws so poor people don't have children.
While you're at it, let's completely fall down this slippery slope, and not insure people who smoke, people who play dangerous sports, or people who travel to countries with high rates of infectious disease.
Let's craft a healthcare system with all sorts of incentives not do things that might make perfect sense, and one that punishes all of people's foibles.
I'd love to fall down your slippery slope, and either not insure or charge very high rates to people who deliberately put their health at risk.
In general, a good regulatory scheme internalizes externalities (i.e., make polluters pay for the pollution they cause). If we force people who take care of their health to subsidize people who don't, we are externalizing an internality. That's the opposite of what good regulations should do.
If we're going to internalize externalities, men who get women pregnant should pay for half of all of her maternity-related healthcare expenses, and for half of the income she would have made if she hadn't had a kid. Do you agree?
I totally agree that smokers and daredevils and adventurers should have to pay higher insurance rates. But making women pay more simply because they get pregnant when they have sex without birth control (or their birth control fails) seems to be punishing them for being born with the wrong set of organs. Pregnancy is a much bigger deal for women than it is for men, yet men have at least as much agency in the process of causing a pregnancy.
I think the big issue is you're conflating healthy people with people who take care of themselves, and sick people with those who don't. There's certainly a correlation there, but there are a lot of sick people who are sick simply because of bad luck. I, for one, wouldn't like society to turn its back on me if I got too sick to work. And I would happily subsidize unlucky sick people in exchange for the promise that I'll get covered if I get sick.
If we're going to internalize externalities, men who get women pregnant should pay for half of all of her maternity-related healthcare expenses, and for half of the income she would have made if she hadn't had a kid. Do you agree?
If we accept the legality of abortion [1], then no - men should be able to terminate their rights/obligations within 3-9 months of discovering the pregnancy for a lump sum payment equal to half the price of an abortion. Equal rights and all that, right?
I think the big issue is you're conflating healthy people with people who take care of themselves, and sick people with those who don't. There's certainly a correlation there, but there are a lot of sick people who are sick simply because of bad luck.
I'm not conflating anything. I'm distinguishing insurance from redistribution. Insurance protects you from bad luck - it just doesn't force other people to pay for your choices.
Raising the price of insurance based on people's choices protects them from bad luck while forcing them to pay the average cost of their choices.
[1] Which I do, but only until the baby grows a brain. Not going to debate that here.
[2] Again, insurance which covers the normal cost of maternity. Insurance which covers maternity costs in excess of 3x (or some such multiplier) the cost of a normal birth makes perfect sense.
Extremely expensive pregnancies are an insurable risk, but standard pregnancy is not.