Question should be: Why is ‘health insurance’ a blank-check? Is not pregnancy the end-all of sex? Should insurance cover birth (how was THAT ‘unexpected’??)
Unfortunately, we’ve gotten away from the main points 1) Why is it the employers business/obligation 2) Insurance = covering the unknown/unexpected...not 6 mo. dental, annual checkups, etc.
Indeed. A large part of this mess is that (to paraphrase Ann Coulter) health "insurance" is an expensive pre-paid service plan.
Insurance *should* cover my recent root canal and the subsequent reconstruction procedures, but not the routine dental check and cleaning.
On pregnancy, there is a case to be made for at least some coverage of childbirth. Since childbirth can have some drastic life-threatening complications, those should be covered even if health "insurance" were truly insurance.
An unfortunate consequence of the model of insurance as a pre-paid plan is that people expect to receive all kinds of expensive and difficult procedures for free, and they have utterly no appreciation of the education and skill it takes to provide those procedures. If they had to pay for routine care, saving the insurance for truly unexpected events, they might develop more of an appreciation for medical care. It takes slightly more skill to be a physician than a hamburger flipper--a fact you would never guess by listening to the current debates.