Yes, and on a much more important (in terms of $$$ it could save) note they still do not wholeheartedly embrace the midwifery model of care for delivering of said babies (and their female counterparts).

A related thought. My friend passed away from Lung Cancer. She never smoked. In the last few years of her life she fought vehemently to bring attention and research money to the disease. From her I learned (I am not checking the numbers now, so please forgive lack of precision) that breast cancer gets something like an order of magnitude more research funding than lung cancer, even though lung cancer is a very serious killer. The explanation was that lung cancer is still associated in people's minds with smoking, even though the stats show that HALF of sufferers did not smoke in their lives. Associating the disease the smoking puts the onus on the sufferer so the public thinks that the sufferers brought this disease onto themselves, and ls much less likely to open its pockets than for breast cancer. Mind you, at some point in Russia, the Orthodox Christian Church propagated the idea that breast cancer was caused by past abortions, a "hypothesis" that in a country that used to not have reliable contraception (and thus all women had abortions) was hard to refute for a poor, scared, lay woman sufferer not well versed in statistical modeling and epidemiological studies. So granted, even breast cancer can be made to appear an illness that the sufferer "deserved". But luckily not in the US. So we have great coverage. As I said earlier, my insurance that pays pennies for mental covered 100% of my digital mammogram (~$600). In California, even illegal immigrant women can get coverage for breast and other gynecological cancers. So the public's appreciation of the suffering this illness brings and of the "innocence" of the sufferers finally caused very significant monetary outlays, even despite of greed.

The leukemia and lymphoma society which raises money for obviously innocent children suffering from blood cancers is probably the top participant in various charity marathons, triathlons and other such events.

So something tells me it is a lot about innocence.

Now enter bipolar and other illnesses. Depressed? "Get over it!" Or, "everyone is depressed in this economy anyway, we are all in the same boat." Hallucinating? "Must have been on illicit drugs." Delusional? "this is scary and we do not want to think about it". And the list goes on. You see how vastly different it is from breast cancer so far?

As was aptly alluded to in recent posts, this illness for some of us just might become a terminal illness. And the advances in treatment, mostly in the form of new antipsychotics' getting approval for bipolar treatment, bring with them weight gain, blood sugar problems and basically the whole metabolic syndrome (that at least the public should understand, because the public supports diabetes research and does not chastise diabetics for possible lack of exercise) which eventually may lead to a terminal illness of a completely different sort. So it is a serious thing. And I just love it how doctors compare BP with diabetes in that it cannot be cured but can be managed whilst I cannot get an insurance coverage to go see a registered dietitian to speak about reducing medication-induced weight gain, and all sorts of nutritional education coverage is available for true diabetics.