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According to my halfassed search engine results, giving birth costs on average $18,000.
Just the cost of epidural, estimates range from $1000 to $3500 out of that cost.
As someone who lives in a country where giving birth is free that sounds absolutely insane to me. Are these birth costs in the US at least covered by common medical insurance or is it always that bad? It's a miracle that the US birth rate is one of the highest in the western world when the conditions are like this...
After my son’s birth in 2006, we owed $12,000 after insurance. That was a single night’s stay in the hospital. Nothing out of the norm for the birth. We had to refinance the house the following year to pay off his and our daughter’s birth from 2005.
I think my hospital bills were around $5,000. What I didn’t anticipate was the fact that once my daughter was born I was paying hospital bills for me and for her. I think without insurance it was around 30k? So insurance covered 25,000 and we paid the rest
Not really, all the third world countries with no real system to pay for old age have high birthrates too.
I had a kid three years ago, we decided to get a higher premium health plan that specifically had excellent natal coverage. It's one of the most expensive plans available to us but we didn't pay anything for 9 months worth of prenatal visits plus 3 days in the hospital. The coverage statement said that delivery from the hospital was something like $28,000 but the first bill we actually saw that we had to pay was for a hearing test that was only partially covered.
An epidural doesn't "cost" 3000€
A whole hospital stay for a normal uncomplicated birth in Germany (5 days) with Epidural is just 3600€ (that's what the hospital gets paid, and most of them are for-profit in Germany)