Having a baby? It will cost more than $7K
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According to a new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the cost of having a baby, from the first prenatal visit to delivery, averaged roughly $7,600 (in 2004 dollars) for an uncomplicated birth.
“Although there have been more than 4 million births each year in the United States since 2000, there is little information in the literature regarding the average medical expenditures generated over the course of a pregnancy,” note Steven R. Machlin and Frederick Rohde of AHRQ, who worked on the report.
To estimate the cost of an uncomplicated delivery, the AHRQ used data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), “a highly detailed source of information on the health services used by Americans, the frequency with which they are used, the cost of those services, and how they are paid for,” according to an agency statement.
As mentioned, the average price tag for bringing an infant into the world in 2004 was $7,600, which includes hospital-related costs for delivery, prenatal office visits, prescription medicines, and other services. The figure consists of direct payments by individuals, private and public insurance plans.
The AHRQ, which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, also calculates that the average amount spent on prenatal care for women with private insurance and women with Medicaid in 2004 was about the same, roughly $2,000. However, the average in-hospital delivery costs for these two groups of women differed: $6,520 for women with private insurance and $4,577 for women with Medicaid.
On average, privately insured women paid about 8 percent of their total expenses for pregnancy out of pocket, or about $660 for a privately insured woman with an average level of expenses. In contrast, women on Medicaid paid only about 1 percent out of pocket, AHRQ reports.
Only 23 percent of women had prescription drug expenses associated with their pregnancy and the average amount of these expenses was $640. Nutritional products, such as prenatal vitamins, made up roughly 75 percent of all prescription drug expenses associated with pregnancy.
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