I’ve heard people say that the delivery didn’t cost them a thing.
I’ve heard people say they were able to pre-pay for the delivery, about $400.
I’ve heard people say it was $5K after insurance.
Of COURSE we have no way of finding out what it will cost to have our baby until the bills come in (because, come on, transparency in medical billing? Pffffft), but we’re keeping back $5K just to be safe. Since we had to pay $300 for each round of blood tests and $160 for the “covered” ultrasound, it seems a fair bet the delivery will be expensive.
So… United States residence who had a baby with health insurance, what was your ballpark?
When one of my friends had her baby it cost her 2700 after insurance took care of most of it. But the original total was 10,750!! Talk about crazy having kids in the U.S is super expensive!!
My most recent (last November) came to about $500, maybe a bit more. I got bills for the actual baby catching, which was the most expensive, then “newborn services,” which included things like the hearing exam, reflexes, etc.
I’m guessing the total cost would’ve come to something like $5,000 without insurance. When I had my son, the total cost of the birth without insurance was $10,000-$15,000 because I had complications and had to stay longer/be monitored more. I think I got just one bill for that experience, maybe $200.
My copay with baby 1 was $25 (insurance with CIGNA). That covered all my pre-natal appointments & the hospital delivery.
My entire fee for baby 2 was $1,500 (did not use insurance for this birth) which included all prenatal appointments with my midwife, a labor & delivery at home, and 2 followup appts.
Call your local hospitals and midwives for a much more accurate answer. Prices vary dramatically depending on where you are. They can’t make any guarantees, because your bill will be based on the care you recieve, and some babies/moms need more care than others. But you can get an *average *for an insured delivery at their location.
My son, born in 1992 in a middle class suburb of Chicago, cost us about $10,000. $2000, more or less, was the OB’s bill. $8,000 was his hospital bill. We didn’t have insurance for him, but we did for me (I was still on my father’s health insurance. The only way to cover my son’s bills was for my father to adopt my son, and we didn’t want to go there.) My hospital bills, which were probably argued down my Blue Cross, were about another $5000, of which we had to pay (I think) $500 out of pocket.
My son’s care was relatively uncomplicated, although he did require frequent heel sticks because he was jaundiced. He roomed in with me, never in the nursery, and was totally breast fed in the hospital. I think we were there less than 48 hours, although to be honest it’s been a long time and I’m not sure about that.
My daughter was born in 2005 by emergency c-section and stayed in the NICU for three and a half months. You don’t want to know what her bill was. There was one day of labs alone for over $20,000. Thanks gods we had insurance for that one. I stopped counting the bills somewhere north of half a million, since we only had to pay our out of pocket maximum (which I think was somewhere just under $6000).
Really, if you want to be safe about it, that’s all you need to know: what’s the annual out of pocket maximum on your health insurance policy? You could pay up to that much, depending on how much care mom and baby need.
I know my out-of-pocket maximum, but somehow, I don’t expect that to have anything to do with reality. Does it? I just assumed the insurance company would find a way to weasle way more money out of us.
It would be friggin’ *sweet *if it turns out to be the real cap on my bills… $2500.
We just had a baby. It cost us a grand total of $500.00 for the whole kit and kaboodle including a last minute C-section, a couple days hospital stay, the usual newborn care and circumcision.
My sister had a baby a month earlier. She had practically the same procedure (unplanned c-section, stay, etc) and told me that she was paying about $3,500 after insurance.
Obviously, the major factor is going to be your insurance plan. Our statement from the hospital actually totaled over $17,000 prior to insurance deductions.
A neighbor of mine had an emergency preemie delivery with lots of special care required. The actual bill before insurance was about equal to the value of her house.
$1800. 1K for the hospitalization, 400 a day to stay. They sent us an itemized bill of everything they covered, and it would have been about 12k “retail”. This was for an uncomplicated natural vaginal birth. We had to stay 2 days because labor went too fast for them to get all the antibiotics in me that they wanted for group B strep.
It was for ours. I was really ready to panic for a bit there as the zeroes kept piling on the end of our total, but our out of pocket maximum really was the maximum for us.
Talk to your insurance company. It’s possible that there might be weasel words like “covered procedures” in your policy. That might mean that, for example, a circumcision, or a 4D ultrasound for cool pictures in utero, won’t be covered, and you’d have to pay that out of pocket in addition to your out of pocket max for “covered procedures”, but those things are pretty few and far between for a routine pregnancy.
Also, read your hospital’s Patient Bill of Rights. It will probably say something on there about how cost is a perfectly valid concern when making health care decisions. If they want to do a procedure that’s not an immediately life saving one, you can tell them to wait until you see if it’s covered, or you can ask them to page someone from billing who can tell you what the cost will be to you if it’s not covered.
ETA: And you can ask about other treatment methods or drugs that are more affordable. Watch out, especially, for $300 antibiotics. They rarely work any better than the $30 ones. Call your pharmacy before your discharge to get a price on the prescriptions they send you home with. Then if there’s something outrageous on there, you can tell the doctor you need a more affordable option. Don’t assume that the doc orders the least expensive or the most effective thing first off. Many of them are simply clueless as to what the drugs they order actually cost.
About the “annual out of pocket maximum” since I’m all interested in that, now. I AM correct that the hospital WILL pull crap like refusing to cover… well, whatever they don’t want to cover, and I’d then have to pay out-of-pocket above my “annual out of pocket” for those things. Epidurals and other pain relief seem like a prime candidate for that. Am I right?
ETA: yeah, what WhyNot just said.
When i was first pregnant, the midwife offered the two prenatal genetics tests to me, if I wanted them. I called the insurance office to ask they were covered, and they had “never heard of either” and “couldn’t tell me without procedure codes”. I just bet they would “never have heard of” an epidural, either.
Nah, they’ll almost *surely *cover an epidural. 60-90% of laboring mothers in US hospitals get them these days. Pain relief in general will be covered. What might not be is things that are not medically necessary, like circumcisions or a 4D ultrasound in the mall that isn’t used to diagnose anything medical.
Insurance companies will approve or deny payment based on what is “usual and customary” medical care in your area, plus information they glean from the entrails of sacrificial doves. Or something.
Your midwife should be able to give you the billing codes for the procedures she wants to do. Most of the drones working the phones don’t know medicine, they only punch the billing code into their computers and see what it says. So yes, I should have said earlier, make sure when you’re calling to see if something is covered that you have an ICD or CPT code for it.
Just talked to them, and they said what you said. Epidurals are covered. We pay 10% of the daily hospital costs until we hit our annual out-of-pocket max. After the first 48 hours, the baby becomes a separately insured person, with her own deducitble and out-of-pocket max.
We paid $0 for each of our two kids. We do have a co-pay ($10 per visit, I believe), but the OB never charged it for any prenatal visits or for the delivery. I don’t know how much he charged the insurance because it doesn’t really matter if you’re not getting the bills.
It can vary wildly. My deliveries are all in the distant past (most recent one is now a teenager) but one cost $620, which was the total cost as I didn’t have insurance at the time. That was your basic drive-by delivery, though. I went to the hospital, delivered within 15 minutes of getting there, and left with my kid as soon as I could, which was about 6 hours later. I had to fight with the hospital on the way out. They were charging me $250 for a labor room, and I was never in a labor room. They said that was a standard charge, whether you used it or not; I insisted that if I hadn’t used it, I shouldn’t have to pay for it–these people were charging me by the individual aspirin, why should they get $250 for a room I wasn’t even in?
The teenager cost me $100 (total) with the insurance I had, which was great, and that was 12 hours of labor with an epidural, a c-section, and four days in the hospital (could have been up to six days with no added cost to me), but the total bill paid by insurance was something like $17,000 (unreal!). The biggest single cost was the drugs, which were something like $500 an hour!
When our baby was born about a year ago, it was a C-section followed by about 24 hours in a NICU. The total bill was about $60K. Insurance covered most of it – I think I only had to pay a few hundred.
Insurance companies can ignore your out-of-pocket maximum if any of the people at the hospital responsible for your care are out-of-network, even if the hospital itself is in-network. Not likely to happen in a standard labor & delivery scenario, but I thought I’d mention it (This happened to us when my son was hospitalized as a newborn. Our out-of-pocket maximum was $1500 but we wound up getting charged about $8,000 for the services of one of the perinatal specialists, who was not actually an employee of Children’s Hospital, but was contracted from an outside practice. The outside practice was out-of-network, and therefore the out-of-pocket maximum did not apply, and we were responsible for the $8k charge. In addition to the actual $1500 maximum for all the stuff that actually was in-network.)
OK, didn’t mean to put a scare story out there, I just tell that story when I can because I personally had no idea such a thing was even possible, when it happened to us.
To answer the question, our out-of-pocket expenses for each of the three kids was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 for the first two (C-section, then vaginal birth with epidural) and around $500 for the third (vaginal birth, no epidural, and a different insurance plan).