Those with the misfortune of requiring chemotherapy and radiotherapy would likely appreciate if they could buy a cheap policy that only covered conventional treatment for life-threatening illnesses such as cancer, rather than being priced out of the market because their insurance is required to cover services they will never or rarely use such as maternity benefits, mental health, prescription drugs, laboratory work, etc.
All these cuts don't save nearly as much as Republicans seem to think.
Take maternity, for example. If maternity is optional, only people who know they'll need it buy it, and a maternity policy often costs double a non-maternity policy or more. But, if maternity is a required benefit, the cost is spread out and only adds a couple percentage points to everyone's costs.
Republicans seem to think they're saving money by cutting maternity, but they're going to be really surprised when young women about to have a child see their rates double or more while everyone else's only go down a percentage point or two (and that's IF the insurer doesn't decide to just hang on to that discount in the name of adverse deviation).
The same principle applies to the other stuff you mentioned. There's just not much to save by carving out services, and the few people who really need them get screwed hard.
A better idea would be for Medicare to pick up all the cancer patients. Medicare already picks up ESRD patients, so there's precedent. Medicare has a much broader network than most private insurance, so the patients would benefit, and their absence from the insured pool would lower the average costs across the board. We could do that with other diseases too, but cancer is a common and expensive condition, so it seems like a good starting point.
