If you are pregnant and have a low income you are probably eligible for medicaid.
Pregnancy is one of the conditions that makes someone Medicaid eligible. The qualifying income levels change from state to state. For instance, in NC, if you were a single mom with 1 child and 1 more on the way, the eligibility cap would be $33,876 per year.
In addition, about 13 states have extended SCHIP coverage to include pregnancy. SCHIP has higher eligibility limits than Medicaid. Even if your state didn’t cover pregnancy, you could at least use it for post-birth care.
If you make decent money, but don’t have health insurance - that’s when you really get screwed. But if you’re making 40k and you don’t self-insure (or find a job with benefits) before starting a family - well, that’s not bright. Pregnancy is a killer for getting new insurance, because it will be treated as a pre-exisiting condition.
One other thing worth noting is that the costs are at least tax deductible, so, depending on your bracket and the state you live in, the actual economic cost could be as little as about 60% of the nominal cost.
What actually prompted my thread is that I was at my Dr’s office for a check up (I’m preggo) and there was a fee chart posted on the wall for people without Alberta Health Care (I’m in Canada).
The initial check up (mine took over 2 hours and had a physical but no pap as I’d had one only a couple of months earlier) would cost $125.
Each follow up appointment was $50
The delivery (assuming no complications) was $2,000.
All told, if everything went well, a bit less than $3,000*. I was curious if that was comparable to what would be paid by someone uninsured in the US, or more or less.
So, I suppose the answer, based on the posts in this thread, is less. I wonder if uninsured folks from the US ever come to Canada to deliver?
FWIW, the whole shooting match will cost me $0.
*Obviously if there are complications, the charges are going to start adding up as specialists, etc. are brought in.
I have my bills for our 7-week-old sitting right in front of me so I can answer this (for a SoCal pregnancy/delivery).
Alice, I believe that the comparable number to what you quote is what my ob/gyn charged (and what is on his fee chart): a flat fee for all visits during preganancy as well as delivery, which came (for me) to $3800. So comparable but a bit more.
I suspect that your $3000 nunmber does not include the actual cost of a hospital stay, as this $3800 did not. The number on my bill for the labor/delivery room was $5400. Drugs/lab (I had an epidural) comes to a bit less than $2000. The private room and nursery after delivery came to $5000. The total bill from the hospital was $13k. This is steep, but the care was VERY good (complete with lactation consultants, nurses on call all the time, a nursery that the baby could go to at any time so we could get sleep, 2 home visits afterwards, etc.).
For a total of ~17k. Eek.
That being said, our insurance pays the entire ob/gyn bill and most of the hospital bill; our out-of-pocket looks like it will be about $1k.
My friend (who already had had two normal pregnancies) is not a fan of hospitals and had a home delivery for her third. Her husband delivered the baby. Charge: $0. However, I wasn’t about to do this
If they’re not Medicaid-eligible, the hospital may well offer to collect the stated bill at some sort of discount, for the uninsured. Better than being paid nothing.
As with hotels, very few people pay rack rate at a hospital. Those stated charges are there (and very high) for other purposes. Certain elements of Medicare reimbursement are based on a very complicated formula that derives in part from a hospital’s stated charges, regardless of whether anyone actually pays those charges. Hospital cost structures are extremely opaque.
I wonder whether the charges posted in the Alberta hospital are similarly not tied to actual cost. How many people deliver there without provincial health insurance? I would expect it to be somewhat cheaper, though. Obstetrics is a very high-cost specialty in the US, because of the malpractice insurance costs.
I just looked it up - a single overnight stay in my local hospital is $1,868, so I guess that would be added on to the total (never even thought of that!!)
All the charges you mentioned and the total sound pretty much in line with what my daughter’s birth cost here in Seattle about 6 months ago. It was paid for by the insurance company, but only after they initially rejected all the claims and tried to stick us with nearly $20k in bills. Gotta keep after those bastards.
Who knows, but we were temporary residents with no insurance (in Switzerland). I did still have US insurance and they actually paid 80% of that bill so my out of pocket cost was $16.
The Swiss are not known for socialism did not, in those days, have universal health insurance (they do now). The doctor was a professor in the medical school and the hospital was the Frauenklinik, the women’s pavilion of the Zurich Cantonal Hospital.
It’s not a single-payer system, though: people have to buy individual insurance; insurers can opt out of the law, but if they wish to comply with it they have to offer insurance to anybody (the costs can vary greatly).
Skip on most pre-natal care. They may be eligible for Medicare, which covers part of the costs as mentioned above, plus any state or city program available. They may not get the drugs, private rooms, and one on one attention others have mentioned, no lactation consultants, no post-partum visits.
This link has some interesting comparisons. The article is about giving birth in a modern Thai hospital, where the cost of an uncomplicated delilvery was $2000 - but $30,000 in the US.
Alice, OK, that sounds comparable to though cheaper than my hospital stay charge (I stayed for 2 nights). I bet your hospital would if you were uninsured also tack on charges for the actual delivery (which necessitates its own room, equipment, nurses – one of whom stayed with me for at least two hours straight, possibly more).
ntucker, ouch! I will have to watch out for that. There’s already a discrepancy where one set of numbers says we have to pay $3k and the other says $1k - I’m fairly sure the $1k number is correct, but I bet they’ll try to argue at least for the $3k number.
Huh, interesting because I got two separate bills both marked “labor/delivery,” the one from the doctor (as part of his lump sum) and the one from the hospital. Although at first I was surprised (“Why do I have two bills for this?”) on reflection this makes sense to me because I wouldn’t expect the doctor to be responsible for taking care of the hospital facility billing. But maybe the billing for your medical system works differently?
ETA: Perhaps your doctor does not have his own private practice but is part of the hospital staff? My doctor has a private practice, though obviously is affiliated iwth the local hospital.
Yip. This bugged the crap out of my sister, who felt she was being responsible by not bringing a baby into this world*. She gets sick right around her 19th birthday, and has to have a major operation. Medicaid refuses to pay. The people at the Medicaid office would mention that she could get it paid for IF SHE WERE PREGNANT.
So now she has a large bill that we’ve been paying down for the last 2 years, and have barely made a dent. Fortunately, my father’s job got a new insurance company, and he was able to put my sister on his account since she was still in college. She pays Dad the difference, which is almost a quarter what it would cost for her to insure herself.
*and, no, I don’t mean through abortion, either, so let’s not turn this into one of those battles.
“Our records indicate that you have primary medical insurance provided by another company.” A simple clerical error, which, after it was cleared up, they managed to make 23 more times over the course of the next few months. UnitedHealthCare, in case you’re curious.
