IOWA CITY — A recent study from the University of Iowa finds that the cost of having a baby in the United States has jumped dramatically since 2008, when the Affordable Care Act took effect.
The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, finds that for women between the ages of 25 and 44, costs have jumped an average of 20 percent in the past three years.
For women in their 40s and 50s, costs increased by 10 percent, the study found.
Iowans are paying more out of pocket for health care than the national average.
“Iowa is one of the few states that actually has a large number of uninsured women,” said Dr. Scott Gannam, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University at Buffalo.
“That has created a financial burden on the population.
It’s a real challenge for people to get care and it’s one of our main drivers for our opioid crisis.”
The cost of care varies greatly by state.
In the first five years of the ACA, costs ranged from $1,700 for a woman who was uninsured to $20,600 for a insured woman.
The cost of a pregnant woman’s care also fluctuates dramatically by state, with a typical woman who is insured having to pay $14,000 to care for a newborn baby.
The average cost for a health care bill for a pregnant Iowa woman in 2018 was $19,100, according to the study.
That’s up from $13,500 in 2020.
While the Affordable care Act helped people afford to get pregnant, it also made it more difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to get the care they need.
The study found that many women in Iowa were paying more than the ACA-mandated premium for health insurance, or Medicaid, because of the high costs.
More than 70 percent of the state’s population is uninsured, according the study, which included nearly one-third of all uninsured adults in Iowa.
If Iowa had a similar number of people without health insurance and the ACA had not been enacted, it would have had a high cost of doing business, according Gannama.
It also means that the ACA is not only unaffordable for people who already have insurance, but that it also has negative economic effects on Iowa, the authors of the new study said.
When the AffordableCare Act became law in 2010, more than 9 million Iowa residents received free or reduced-cost health care coverage, according a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The state is one in four counties with uninsured residents.
Nearly two-thirds of the people who are uninsured live in counties that are not in the state.
There are nearly 5 million people in Iowa who have no health insurance.
That means the state has the highest uninsured population in the country, according for the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Iowa Insurance Department has estimated that about 6.5 million people are uninsured in the U, but the number of those who are not covered by insurance has been declining over the past decade.
One-third, or 2.6 million, of Iowa residents have a pre-existing condition, and about 2.2 million of those are pregnant.
The vast majority of these pregnant people have a condition that does not require medical treatment, according according to Gannamy.
People without health coverage can also face financial hardship if they have to pay higher premiums, and some have been unable to get insurance for years.
The most recent data shows that the number who were uninsured fell to 4.2 percent in 2017.
That is down from 5.6 percent in 2016, and the number with health insurance was 8.3 percent in 2018, according HealthCare.gov data.
The majority of uninsured Iowa women are younger than 30 years old.
Nearly two-third are women between 30 and 44 years old, according data from the Iowa Department of Health.
A significant number of women are white and a majority of them have health insurance through their employer, Gannami said.
