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There was just a big NY Times article on the cost of childbirth. Turns out its extremely hard to shop around. Not only is it much more expensive in the US than
by GabrielF00 13y ago
There was just a big NY Times article on the cost of childbirth. Turns out its extremely hard to shop around. Not only is it much more expensive in the US than in any other country to give birth, but, with a few exceptions, it's very difficult to get pricing information in advance. To quote:
>When she became pregnant, Ms. Martin called her local hospital inquiring about the price of maternity care; the finance office at first said it did not know, and then gave her a range of $4,000 to $45,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/health/american-way-of-birth-costliest-in-the-world.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/health/american-way-of-bir...
- mpyne 13y agoPlus when you "shop around" you still need to select a doctor's office which is close enough to be within viable range once the moment of delivery is at hand. Even in the suburban areas I've lived in, for us that meant a "selection" of between 3-4 potential clinics, not exactly a very wide choice (and completely based on where I lived so it could very well have been that I would have been selecting from 4 of the worst clinics in the whole state).
- foobarian 13y agoOn the billing side, I feel like there is a lot of inefficiency due to errors caused by complicated systems. When my wife was pregnant, at some point we got billed several thousand dollars for a procedure the insurance company refused to cover. She called the insurance co., and they (I think) recoded the procedure to something that cost a couple of hundred dollars and was covered to boot. It seemed like there was a bunch of new employees on both sides who were learning as they went (and pressing random buttons). So forget in advance, pricing was hard to find out even post facto ;)