Hellobee

Holy crap! I’m from Canada, so luckily we don’t pay anything to deliver our babies (or for anything medical for that matter).. but jeez! If I had to save up that much to have had a baby.. I may never have had one! The only bill I received from the hospital after I had my baby was for $16.00 (20% of the cost of a private room, which isn’t covered under Health Care). If I’d shared a room with someone my cost would have been $0.

I’m glad your insurance covered that.. I think that’s ridiculous. Sorry America, but we win on this one.

I never saw the hospital bill for either DD or DS’ births and only paid $10 out of pocket for each. My insurance bills pregnancy as an inclusive service so all expenses are covered (for me and baby) under the initial OB/GYN office visit co-pay. My insurance changed a little this renewal so now I have a deductible of $200 for the family but that still wouldn’t have been too bad.

we paid a lot out of pocket with insurance. the private room wasn’t covered with charlie (i stayed in a free room with olive), and i got bills for thousands from all the various doctors (hospital, my ob, etc)!

I’ve spoken to my female coworkers and budgeted about $5K to pay out of pocket. There’s no way I’ll know exactly what my copays will be until after the fact, but I think $5K is a good bet since they all seemed to pay between $2,500 – $4K depending on how and where they delivered.

Great post!!

@wildcardinside: please, no healthcare gloating!

My total cost out of pocket for maternity care and delivery was $30 out of pocket (one co-pay).

That being said… my total hospital bill was close to $60,000. I ended up with an emergency c-section and my daughter went to the NICU for 4 days. I have never been so thankful for my health insurance in all of my life!!

Wow! I am jealous of your insurance. We paid $13,000 out of pocket for medial expenses the year Lorelei was born. It was painful. It is very interesting to see the cost break-down for a birth!

@WildCardInside; I am coming to live with you in Canada, okay?

I paid 20% of all of my bills and hit just below my deductible. So, I paid about $3500 out of pocket for the hospital bills for my daughter and me. I was lucky to be at a hospital that has only private rooms so that is not an extra charge!

@mrbee: haha, sorry!

My total bill was somewhere in the range of $35,000. Induction, emergency c-section, five days in hospital. Out of pocket, I think we paid about $3000. It’s hard to remember after all of the various bills we got.

i was just grateful that i paid nothing out of pocket that i didn’t bother to look at the bill. i have had a previous hospital stay, though, where i got up close and uncomfortable with bills because the myriad of providers i encountered while i was there were not all covered by my insurance. that sucked.

@mrs.tricycle: Working for a hospital, I would venture to say the other diagnostic services was some sort of imaging–perhaps fetal monitoring (the doppler) and/or ultrasound, if one was done during labor. Your bill seems pretty average, but awesome for you that it cost you nothing. We’re preparing to owe about $1000 or less with our insurance.

I paid around $1,250 out of pocket for a c-section with my son. I recently switched over to my husband’s insurance which was a huge mistake because it would be I think around $5k out of pocket the next time around if I’m still on his policy. I need to get a new job and new insurance before we have #2.

That’s mental! Like @wildcareinside I live in the UK so don’t pay anything to deliver because it’s covered by the National Health Service. Don’t know what I’d do if I needed to find that much money out of pocket!

I love you, Canada!

Also in Canada, so also 0. And we delivered at a hospital that only has private rooms, so there was no additional cost for that.

While I am so grateful for our universal healthcare plan, I do sort of wish that we would get an invoice indicating what the province paid for the services we received (not just with child birth, but with anything). We are so disconnected from what the costs of healthcare are!

My husband and I work at a University and use the healthcare afflicated with the medical school. So I did have to use the hospital affiliated with our school– but it was great and $0 out of pocket.
I did get a really large bill for the anesthesiologist who did my epidural because he was ‘out of network’– I called to fight it because when I was ready for the epidural the last thing I was asking was about my network! I guess this happens to many women and it was approved and waived. Thank goodness for healthcare!

The total charge from my hospital was $13155.44. The amount my insurance paid them was $3336.40, and i paid $0 OOP since i had hit my $1200 deductible already.

Interesting blog post!

I can’t remember exactly, but my hospital bill was between $2000 and $3000. I delivered vaginally and I did not have any anesthesia. I only had to pay $250 and my insurance covered the rest. I’ve Kaiser Permanente, & I love it!

This post is so well timed! I am pregnant with my second and having another home birth but was having a conversation with a friend about cost comparisons. I had no idea what a hospital birth could cost, I knew my insurance would cover it a 100% if we went that route but its not for us so I have never reaped those financial benefits. Instead we pay a midwife $4500 (which is more of a strain this time around than last) which is cheaper than a hospital birth if you do not have insurance. Thank you for the insight!

We hit our deductible earlier in the year so our out of pocket was $0, plus 20% of the cost of M’s circumcision, which went towards his deductible for the following year. Our overall bill looked pretty similar to yours. My doula was about $1200.

My bill was around $30,000 for LO and I. I had a c-section and then LO had jaundice so we were in the hospital for a 6 days. My hospital only has private rooms so there wasn’t an extra charge for that. We paid our $3000 copay and about $600 for LO’s copay. We also paid $1500 flat fee for all the prenatal visits, ultrasounds, etc.

The hospital tried charging me an extra $350 dollars for some extra anesthesiology fee. I had to call the hospital and then have my insurance on the line to clarify the mistake. Basically, whoever inputted the billing was off on one digit of some code and that resulted in the charge. The $350 should have fallen under the general insurance bill but didn’t. It was so confusing and frustrating to get this one thing taken care of.

Hooooooly buckets! Our home birth cost us a little less than $3K and our hospital birth was a little over $3K, I think. We “only” had to pay about $1K out of pocket. We’ll be paying this home birth completely out of pocket and it’ll probably be between $2K-$3K once we have all the supplies and so on.

Our hospital bill was around $16k. Luckily we only had to pay a $250 copay that covered both me and the baby. I was so shocked to see how much it would have cost without insurance, though, especially since I had no meds!

I agree in Canada we are so disconnected with how much healthcare costs. I dont know how everyone in the US does it. Im sure we would make it work but dang, thats a lot of money.

We paid $500 for our doula, and that’s it. Pregnancy Medicaid covered the rest.

Our bill was around $15k for an unmedicated vaginal delivery. We paid about $6k out of pocket total for everything since that was our family deductible (high deductible private insurance through my small employer). It sucked. We just wrote the last check for our payment plan for our medical bills in May… LO is 15 months old

Between the hopsital bill for me, LO, and my OB bill. It was about $20K. We paid around $3,500.

this is such an interesting post to hear everyone vastly different bills from around the country. here in northern calif, i had a vaginal delivery, epidural, 2 nights in the hospital, about $25K. insurance thankfully covered 99% of the bill.

I had a planned c-section, private hospital room and three day hospital stay. We got a bill for the delivery, anesthesia, room and hospital stay (which was separate from the room — weird, right?!)

It was somewhere around $35,000 total, but we paid $2,600 total with insurance.

WOW! Makes me grateful to live in Australia, our hospital bills and OB bills are covered 100% by our goverment health care scheme…You can ofcourse have private health insurance if you wish to be in a fancy private hospital.

I never added up all the charges, I had quite a few overnights and one fuve day stint in L&D before I delivered so I imagine the bill was large. We were lucky and our insurance covered 100%. this time around we aren’t so lucky, they changed our coverage to a $1000 deductible, we pay 5% until that $1000 is satisfied then they’ll pay 100%. We haven’t satisfied that deductible yet do they’ll bill us $1000 at the end.

My emergency C-section bill ended up being around $30,000. Beyond that, we had to stay in the hospital for a week so that they could monitor my LO who had been admitted as a patient as well. Her bill was $30,000. I’ve never been so grateful for my amazing insurance plan as I was then…. I didn’t have to pay a single penny.

I have a “Preferred Provider Plan” (it’s kind of like an HMO) and as long as I deliver in a “preferred” hospital with a “preferred” provider (which I am), and I’ve met my $200 deductible, our out-of-pocket cost is supposed to be a flat $350. However, I’m not sure if that includes EVERYTHING? I should really call my insurance company and ask.

wow crazy! Mine was definitely up there, I didn’t have an epidural but I was induced. I also had midwife bills in addition to hospital bills because originally I was going through a birth center and then had to transferred.

I was on MA at the time so that covered MOST of the bills, except that my last-minute transfer to hospital was out of state so it didn’t cover the actual delivery and we paid over $2,000 out of pocket.

@marionberry: Ah! that makes sense! Thanks for cluing me in. I’m glad I didn’t actually have to pay any of these bills, ’cause I’d be pretty annoyed forking over my money for stuff I couldn’t even decipher!

Wow, reading this, and the comments I’m now echoing some of the other non-US bee’s when I say I’m glad of my UK National Health service meaning I won’t pay out of pocket for my planned hospital delivery in September (though obviously we *do* contribute via tax payments…)

I’m curious though; since you US ladies pay for health insurance which (as I understand it) hopefully covers you in full or in part for your hospital bills, surely there is some kind of ‘out-of-pocket’ cost associated with this, even if it’s that of your insurance premium? I’d love a (simple) explanation if anyone is willing to provide one!

I have a high deductible plan with an HSA. I was budgeting to have to spend about $3,000 out of pocket. Unexpectedly, I got into a car wreck and delivered then. We got into a weird situation where my health insurance paid for some but the other driver’s auto insurance paid for most.

I got to see all the bills and see what the settled bill ended up being. For an emergency c-section, a ton of x-rays, an MRI, four days in the hospital and all of the newborn care – the total was around $30k. Our lawyer negotiated to have only $5k of the car insurance settlement go towards that entire bill! Crazy how much insurance carriers / attorneys can negotiate sky high bills to only a few thousand. I feel so bad for people who have to pay the entire bill out of pocket with no one negotiating on their behalf.

Our total was around $18,000 — we only paid $1,000. Thank goodness for insurance!!

I didn’t have to pay anything out of pocket (that you amazing insurance), but we never received a bill like this, either. I might have passed out if I had!!

Ours was around $17k and we paid 10 percent ($1700). Healthcare bills are so stressful!!

My stay cost about $24k…but I also stayed in the hospital for about a week. We only paid $250 out of pocket for the copayment. And my darling LO cost $800k…she was in the NICU for 57 days…..but still only a $250 copay for her too! Thank goodness for good insurance. We joke that she is our (almost) million dollar baby!

With my son, I was induced but had no pain meds. We had to stay 3 nights after a vaginal delivery that included a vacuum. His circumsicion was not done at the hospital.

With my daughter, I was induced, did get the epidural for an uncomplicated vaginal delivery, stayed 2 nights.

We do not have the best insurance. Including ob, hospital and anesthesia, Both cost us around $3000-4000 out-of-pocket plus our $500 deductible (we pay 20% of total after we reach our deductible). CRAZY!

I had a section for my first and I think we paid out of pocket around $3k? The rest was covered. But that was just in the hospital. I don’t remember if it included a one day and night stay in the ped’s ward for phototherapy. With our second we got smart and switched to better insurance and paid zero for another section. Although we’re paying more per month it was worth it since the kids see the doctor a lot for well visits and for when they get sick or other misc things like falling down the stairs (scary!!!).

Argh.. medical care in the US… I didn’t have insurance until I was about 12 weeks along, so I was paying very close attention to our bills and asking how much stuff was going to cost before I did it. Our medical system is completely jacked up. I was charged $40 for a pee stick test at the doctors office. I know they get those things bulk, super cheap. I could have gone to CVS and picked one up cheaper on the way to the doctors office. They gave me a hard time because I refused to pay $500 for a blood typing test and HIV test. My blood type hasn’t changed since my last child. And I can go to a free clinic in town for an HIV test if I was really concerned about it. They things they test for and what they charge is ridiculous. That’s why insurance is so expensive. I did get insurance through my husbands work, but that experience was definitely eye opening and I still intend to scrutinize my bills and what they try to charge my insurance company for.

Our bills were somewhere between $13,000 and $14,000, which took care of an induction, epidural, vaginal delivery, and two days post delivery in a private room. I think we paid the max out of pocket which was $500.

I agree with you though. It was crazy confusing to get multiple bills for the “same” service (i.e. one for the epidural from the hospital and one for the anesthesiologist who administered the epidural).

This really speaks to the confusing nature of the entire US insurance system. I wish they would do something about it.