Story at a glance
- The median cost for a vaginal birth in the United States is about $13,000 for someone using an in-network doctor.
- That cost varies by state and health insurance provider, though. In some states, the maximum price for a vaginal birth is closer to $20,000.
- Childbirth costs are putting many young Americans into medical debt as a result.
Having a baby is expensive in the U.S. — and it’s getting costlier.
The median cost for an in-network C-section in the U.S. last year was about $15,500, while the median cost of a vaginal birth with no complications was almost $13,000, according to FAIR Health’s cost of giving birth tracker.
And the national median price for an out-of-network birth is more than twice as expensive, according to the tracker.
Those figures have climbed in recent years as inflation, technological advances and a shortage of healthcare workers, among other factors, have driven up hospital prices and private insurers and employers have hiked deductibles. Between 2017 and 2021, the price of deliveries and childbirth hospital stays increased by 22 percent, according to data from the Health Care Cost Institute’s 2021 Health Care Cost and Utilization Report.
For many expecting parents, the exorbitant costs are a source of stress — and ultimately, debt.
Sadie Peterson, 28, considered herself lucky when she had her first baby in 2020.
She and her husband were able to put aside $7,000 before their baby was born to help pay for the cost of the delivery.
On top of that, Peterson received health insurance through her job at a local health insurance company in her hometown of Albany, Ore.
That insurance policy covered the bulk of Peterson’s C-section and her and the baby’s subsequent three-day-long hospital stay.
In total, Peterson paid about $5,000 out-of-pocket for the delivery. And her friends and family gave her many of the supplies new parents need to welcome a child.
Peterson is now expecting her second baby in December, and she knows that things will be a little tougher this time around.
She is no longer working and switched health insurance providers, so she and her husband are now expecting to pay closer to $12,000 for this delivery.
“I’m not really sure how I’m going to make it work,” Peterson said. “It’s crazy that having a kid is like buying a new car now.”
How much a person spends on their delivery varies by location and depends on their healthcare coverage. Americans who are covered by Medicaid, for example, spend little or nothing out-of-pocket to have a baby.
But Americans with private insurance or health care coverage through their employer are having to pay more to give birth via rising deductibles and other forms of cost sharing, according to Cynthia Cox, the director of the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker Project.
These costs are increasing in order to control increasing healthcare spending across the country, Cox added.
“Private insurers and employers are raising deductibles as a way to kind of get people to think twice about whether they need that healthcare or not,” Cox told The Hill.
“But what that means is that people are having higher and higher out-of-pocket spending.”
Hospital prices have seen the largest growth of any product or service across the economy, according to Christopher Whaley, an associate professor in the Department of Health Services, policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health.
One analysis from the American Enterprise Institute found that the price of hospital services has gone up by 200 percent since the year 2000.
The reason for this, according to Whaley, is “increased concentration, better and more expensive technology, and insurance coverage that lessens how much patients feel price increases.”
Some other contributing factors are hospital expenses increasing due to inflation, the healthcare workforce shortage, the rising cost of labor and drugs, according to the American Hospital Association.
Another factor is the fact that hospitals are treating sicker patients due to the population aging and care being deferred during the pandemic, an AHA spokesperson told The Hill.
Hospital expenses increased by 17.5 percent between 2019 and 2022 for those reasons, according to the AHA spokesperson.
“While hospitals cannot raise costs or prices in the same way most businesses can—like grocery stores and airlines—to make up for increased financial pressure and lost revenue, they are seeking higher reimbursements for care from insurers, many of which have made record profits over the last few years,” the AHA spokesperson said in an email to The Hill.
When it comes to childbirth services specifically, the AHA spokesperson noted that the workforce shortage, inadequate Medicaid payments and the high cost of malpractice insurance for providers also contribute to the high price of delivery.
Medicaid pays 88 cents for every dollar hospitals spend caring for Medicaid patients, the spokesperson said.
The increasing price of deliveries as a result of all these factors is placing a huge financial burden on young parents and driving many Americans into debt.
More than 40 percent of American adults carry healthcare debt, including 40 percent of those aged 18-29, according to a report published by KFF last year. Pregnancy and childbirth costs were a contributing factor for 20 percent of those young adults — and 29 percent of the women under 30 in particular.
Peterson will most likely join the ranks of those young Americans, since she plans on setting up a payment plan with her hospital to slowly pay off her upcoming delivery.
“I live what I would consider a pretty nice lifestyle,” she said. “If this is what it’s like for a household that makes over $100,000 a year and pays for good insurance every month … what happens to these people that aren’t making as much?”
Published on Oct 22,2023