insurance against 'brith defects'

[eidsvold]

news story here

Not sure how I feel about this.

even more gobsmacked when I read in another article that the opposition leader of Australia says:

"If people want to buy insurance in relation to having a baby and insure against catastrophic events in the process of giving birth to a child, then they should be free to do so," he told reporters.

The conditions listed in this other article - what a surprise - DS is listed first followed by spina bifida and blindness.

Whilst I can see a benefit in that if you need to have modifications to your house due to a safety or physical issue but again - I do not see having a child with down syndrome as a catastrophic event.

tasteless money making ploy. would there be a financial reason for taking out the insurance - in Oz do you have to pay for portage/physio/SALT etc for kids, or are they availabel for free in state system?

Wow. The comment at the bottom of the article is interesting

"You insure your car against an accident, your house against a fire, so why not the health of your child or your pregnancy,"

Umm. Well you can always buy another house or car...

I think this must be pretty cynical, I can't see how this would benefit anyone, I mean the pay out is $50,000 Australian Dollars - that's not going to pay for all the extra care/ stuff/ time that virtually any child with a more complex SN will need. If people are paranoid enough to take out insurance against 'birth defects' presumably a large number of them will terminate anyway if that's the case. So what use is the money?

they are available but it can be a bit of a postcard lottery. But we can access through two government departments - health or disability services.

We do pay for private speech therapy for dd1 - just because we think that is important and the team originally providing her with therapy went through a real time of change and there was some hassle with staff.

dd1 also can access community groups and support too. She also gets a health care card which means she pays less ( or we do) for her prescriptions, and other resources.

eidsvold - having a child with a visual impairment isn't a catastrophe either . These are the things people are most scared of I suppose. I can see the case for insurance to cover the extra expenses - but that's not what this is about.

Insurance policies are supposed to exclude 'acts of god' - which is not meant necessarily in a religous sense but more to reflect that some risks are uninsurable

wonder if it covers someone cocking up at the birth

Relating to this, I was involved in this event in 2000 when pregnant with DD3.
Apparently over 150 of us were given the wrong stats in pregnancy and 4 of us went on to have a child with DS. Obviously, we were all pregnant with a child with DS anyway, and the testing made no difference to that.
But I subsequently heard that some mothers affected by the statistic cock up, and who then went on to have NT babes, actually tried to sue the hosp, for "mental distress"!!! Obviously, I was gutted for them......

Yes, who decides on which conditions, and an appropriate pay out?
Its just preying on a PG womans fears.......

Crimpolene - I agree wholeheartedly. In fact I find it interesting that those three conditions were used as examples. I guess it does come down to what you said - it is what people are most afraid of.

Not belittling ectopic pregnancies either, but why 50K for that?

Very sicko to me

eidsvold, hope you don't mind me asking, how much is private salt?

kreamkrackers - roughly £50 per hour. The way I have done it is £150 per initial report (2 home visits plus nursery visit, with report and plan of work), the 3 or 4 review visits £50. I think you live quite near Merseyside, so I could recommend the lady I use for DS.

That's a lot of money for us but we need the help. I've started the hanen course but after 3 weeks we've not really got any useful tips for DD1 and it's been making me worry more as they talked about the importance of each stage of development such as when they're babies they have different cries for what they need whereas DD1 only cried a handful of times, it was a very quiet cry and was only when she was in severe pain. The other parents children have only got the speech delay, not the wide range of issues we have.

Perhaps when the course is over I'll consider it more then, hopefully we can try to make cut backs from now on and see how much money we can put asides for this as I feel the communication problems are a huge barrier for us. I'll contact you nearer the time when we'll be able to pay for this.

Thanks for the advice.

Big appologies for the quick hijack

kreamkrackers - we are in Aus and the one we go to charges $50 if you pay on the day or $55 if paid on account. Medicare ( kind of like NHS) allows you to claim for five sessions a year - so for 5 sessions that we pay $50 for - we get almost $48 back. As we only go fortnightly - it covers the first term.

We did Hanen - we had a number of children with all sorts of conditions - our dd with down syndrome, children with autism - at various places on the spectrum and a child with cerebral palsy. Whilst we were doing the program - we did not see a huge change in dd1 but it was after that we saw her desire to communicate change. I found it just became second nature to use the strategies we learnt at Hanen - even passing some on to her teachers etc.

I must say our leader did go to great lengths to stress Hanen was not about teaching them to 'talk' but to encourage them to communicate in whatever form they wanted to use. We had one little girl who just vocalised. We were given a video of our sessions that were videoed for feedback - and it was interesting to note the change over the period of time - which when we were doing it did not seem to be occurring.

Keep going with Hanen - I think it will come for you as time goes on.

kreamkrackers - we had to struggle to find the money at first - and then dh got a payrise. I was worried how long we could keep it up BUT the improvement in dd1's speech but more importantly clarity of speech is just amazing. We just go fortnightly as that is what we can afford but I found doing all the 'homework' with her saw results that we had not seen with the nhs type salt who was focusing on language rather than sounds iyswim.