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619 sats \ 3 replies \ @anon 25 Feb \ on: The Price Tag For Giving Birth charts_and_numbers
Listen no one would argue that US health costs are too high, but I know tons of people who have had kids (including myself) and none have paid more than $1000 out of pocket at most. I'm highly skeptical of this data. We paid zero out of pocket with a narrow network employer sponsored health plan.
Lets left side of the bell curve this, we see stats all the time about how the vast majority of Americans cannot afford a $500 emergency bill, if that's true then how are tens of millions of parents paying $11-15k per birth? This doesn't pass the smell test. 99% of Americans simply could not afford that, and its not like a house where you can get a subsidized tax deductible loan to otherwise afford the unaffordable.
The only way I can see this even being remotely accurate is if that is the total cost to the system, not the patient's out of pocket, e.g. your health plan pays the hospital $11k but you pay only say $500-1000 out of pocket.
Medical bureaucracy/EHR stuff in the US insane and I'm sure exists simply to make people even more money. These numbers probably aren't what people see in their IRL billed experience, but due to how it's all accounted for with insurance etc, these numbers probably do move between accounts in some kinda double entry manner. That 11k-15k is probably taken from some database / spreadsheet where it's all the underlying billable items between providers etc.
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All the prices are fake in the US medical system, but you do have to factor in how much people pay for insurance that covers child birth in addition to the out of pocket.
You're right, though, that this is probably some "cost to the system". Again, though, those prices are fake and circular and are basically a big grift, so the resulting figure isn't very helpful.
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