Does America want Moms to stay at home?

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-02-2005
Does America want Moms to stay at home?
987
Mon, 12-12-2005 - 11:28am
It was actually dh that suggested that America (gov't I suppose) wants Moms to stay at home. From what I have learned from these boards daycare is hideously expensive and maternity leave is very short. Many have said they couldn't afford to work because of daycare costs. Compare this to Canada where we have $7 a day daycare and Quebec is increasing maternity leave to 2 years at 55% pay or 1 year at 75% pay in January. With the $7 a day daycare Moms can easily afford to work, and with the paid maternity leave Moms can easily afford to stay home. It seems that in the states you're 'forced' into situations because it's your only option. Can't afford daycare? Stay at home. Maternity leave too short or have to work to support the family? Go back to work. Would any of you prefer if it would be easier financially to make either decision like it seems to be in Canada or are you fine with how it is?

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

Image hosted by Photobucket.com


Pages

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-04-1997
Wed, 12-14-2005 - 11:10pm
I got billed for an anesthesiologist and full epidural care to the tune of about 3K when I had my second. The only thing is, I had no anesthetics whatsoever. The insurance company was going to go ahead and pay it but they called me about it because they couldn't understand how I had checked in at 1'41 am, had the baby at 3:34 am, checked out at 7:40 am and still had time for an epidural and for the baby to have two complete physicals. But what prompted the letter wasn't the epidural, they were balking at paying for the check up by the home health nurse 48 hours later. I believe she billed them for something like three hundred bucks.
iVillage Member
Registered: 12-29-1999
Wed, 12-14-2005 - 11:17pm

He did some diagnostic testing (HSG test, for ex) but the only thing my insurance company refused to cover was the dr's fee for the shot of pergonal. They paid for the pergonal script (less co-pay), but wouldn't pay for the actual injection. Bizzare. However, they've covered all the cyclical ultrasounds (2-3 a month) and hCG injections (to make me ovulate), plus covered all scripts (including injectibles that aren't supposed to be covered, I mean, who takes pergonal and hCG for anything BUT infertility). Now that I have the endo dx, coverage may be easier to get b/c we can claim "endo" vs. "infertility" but our HMO has surprised me w/what they're willing to cover w/all this. Of course, we're switching Jan 1st, so my new HMO probably won't pay a dime of it...in which case, DH and I will start paying cash.

But yeah, I've been, frankly, stunned by what they'll cover. Especially after I had to protest, in writing, three times that they had to cover a state-mandated hearing test when DS was a newborn. They won't cover a $60 hearing test, but they'll pay for multiple ultrasounds a month? I can not explain it.

edited to add: while the diagnostic testing was going on, we were still trying to get pg. So he'd do testing early in the cycle, but also do stuff to try to help us get pg. Obviously it hasn't worked yet...but the diagnostic stuff was going on w/the other stuff. And the dx stuff was like once every three mths, the other stuff is monthly. Does that make sense?




Edited 12/14/2005 11:19 pm ET by mygarnetboy
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Wed, 12-14-2005 - 11:43pm

No, Regional (aka "The Regency", an ironic nickname, given that the place was a dump). It closed in 1996, and the only sort of replacement for it is a series of outpatient clinics called ConnectCare. If you don't have any health coverage at all and are sick enough to need inpatient care, you usually end up at SLU or Barnes, but if they have met their quotas, maintenance care is usually all you are going to get, and they will discharge you home as soon as you are not longer critical.

http://stlouis.missouri.org/citygov/planning/research/data/about/hsw/stathsw.htm

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Wed, 12-14-2005 - 11:58pm

At your age, a case might be made that failure to ovulate is a disorder, whereas failure to get pregnant is infertility. RE's treat other related endocrine disorders such as PCOS and Turner's Syndrome, so even if fertility is the practice's main focus, it's likely that at least some of the patients there have genuine medical problems that affect other aspects of their health.

We once had sort of the opposite insurance problem with DH; he had a condition that was very painful for him, but which usually only gets diagnosed in infertility cases. He had to put up with it for nearly a year and get 4 specialists to back up his claims of pain before the insurance would cover the surgery he needed to fix the problem. (That all happened before DS was born, long before infertility became an issue for us. Of course, there are a raft of RE's in this town who will claim that infertility isn't an issue for us; I get pregnant very easily. Unfortunately, these days I can't seem to manage to stay that way for more than 4 months.)

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-22-2005
Wed, 12-14-2005 - 11:58pm
Your GFIL was lucky. My ex's Mom went into a nursing home in 2002 with nearly 500K in liquid assets (after her dh died). It was gone 18 months before she died and she was basically made a ward of the state and the only reason she didn't lose her house, too was because her adult daughter is a quadriplegic and the state couldn't take it from her.

Karen


"IHere are some juicier bits from the

Karen

"Veronica: "I hate fake deer too. Every time I see their stupid fake-deer faces I want to grab a shotgun and go all Cheney on 'em." Sure, but since fake deer don't talk, they won't

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-29-1999
Thu, 12-15-2005 - 12:11am

My neighbor had that problem (got pg easily, couldn't stay that way) and had twins in Oct. She was seeing my specialist. If you want to email me through my profile, I'll give you his name. He's kind of an odd duck (very nice, he just sort of reminds me of a mad scientist), but he came very highly recommended. And his staff is wonderful.

My heart goes out to you, infertility sucks, but miscarriage is utterly heartbreaking.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 12-15-2005 - 12:15am

Yes, the only thing that saved him was that he wasn't actually in the full-care wing until last year. Before that, he was in the assisted-living wing, which was much less expensive. It was going REALLY fast there at the end; he was praying to die before it was all gone.

My mother was in a full-service nursing home for 9 years. (She really didn't need it the whole time, but there were was no home health care and no assisted-living facilities where she lived.) We had to impoverish her deliberately before we could get her in, because she didn't have many real assets, just Dad's very small Civil Service survivor's pension and less than $10K in savings; she wasn't eligible for SS or Medicare because she had never worked in the US. This was before the feds cracked down on giving money away; we put $4K in the grandchildren's names so that we would be able to use some of her money to keep her in things like shoes, clothing and hygiene supplies, and the rest went into a funeral insurance plan.

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-29-1999
Thu, 12-15-2005 - 12:17am

I vaguely remember when that closed b/c there was quite a brouhaha. Didn't some activists threaten to (or actually) chain themselves to the building before it was knocked down? I was away at college at the time, but close enough to get our news as well as the local stations. I preferred the large market news to the small market we were in, which is ironic since my sister now works at one of those small stations I used to mock. ;)

Anyway--if Regional was like our "county" hospital, then what was City Hospital for? I ask only b/c I thought it served a similar purpose, although I'm not quite old enough to remember (and for all I know, neither are you). I just know my parents have said my bio mom would have given birth to my sister and me there if my parents hadn't sprung for our birth at Barnes, which they did b/c apparently City Hospital was a dump.

Just curious.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2004
Thu, 12-15-2005 - 12:23am
Are you TTC?

Mondo

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 12-15-2005 - 1:07am

Because *everyone* is required to pay into them, of course. Any time the Feds require sharing of personal assets for a common *social* good, that's "socialism". Naturally, defense doesn't count. The provision of guns with tax money isn't socialist, but the provision of butter with tax money is. You mean you didn't know that? ;-)

What Americans who call themselves Conservatives tend not to realize is that in the EU, everyone uses social programs, not just the poor, so there is very little "I hate paying for benefits I don't use" effect. You use what you pay for, whereas in the States most better-off people do not, so the Republicans love to use that to stir up resentment about "entitlement programs", which as every right-thinking American knows, are purely Communis' inventions. (Hear that echo of Jesse Helms?)

I absolutely gnash my teeth when I hear all that tommyrot about how if "other countries are so great, why does everyone want to come to the US?" Perhaps because the "everyone" in question are mostly poor and uneducated people who come from the third world, where everything they know about life in the US has been learned by watching shows like Dallas and Baywatch? Perhaps because the US press is so blinkered that they don't bother to tell us about all the other countries that also have people beating down the doors to immigrate? (Canada being one of them.) There is widespread belief that class and ethnic origin don't matter at all in the US, but while it may matter less here than in many places, the idea that it does not matter at all is dead wrong, as many immigrants (including my father) learn once they get here. It's not as easy as movies and television would lead one to think.

Did you see any of Barack Obama's speech from last weekend? He accused the Republicans of social Darwinism again; and I think he has a good point. (http://www.knox.edu/x9803.xml)
Funny how when you're a child it's rude not to share, but when you get to be a grownup it's somehow perfectly OK to go around declaring, "Mine! Mine!" all the time.

Pages