Maternity Options (Raleigh, Kelly: insurance, home, living)

[WithoutThePressure]

We just had our first baby with BCBS and maternity, but have been considering other more cost effective ways of having the next baby (maybe 2 years). Does anybody know the most cost effective way of delivering a baby without insurance? I'm aware of discounts at some places, but would love anything more specific. Thx!

[lamishra]

At home with a midwife you can pay cash for?

[WithoutThePressure]

Hmm...yeah we could save up, but I have no idea what the cost would be. Any ideas? That's kinda what I was getting at, it seems that there must be more cost effective ways of having a baby, not everybody has insurance.

[MAtoNC!]

Mothering Magazine (Mothering Dot Commune) has a Finding Your Tribe section where you could get lots of info on that!

[KellyCrash]

My ob/gyn requires for the birth to be paid for prior to delivery if you do not have insurance. I wouldn't even want to attempt it without some kind of insurance. You just never know what could go wrong and what kind of complications you could have that could end up costing you a lot more than you were expecting. Preterm birth & a stay in the NICU could literally wipe you out & then some.

I don't reccomend it trying to do it without insurance.

[VickiR]

I'm going to agree with Kelly on this!

My first child was born a month early and had a few issues. He was in Intensive Care Nursery for 2 days. The cost was RIDICULOUS but we had great insurance! I remember looking over the bill that came in the mail, showing all the different charges. An aspirin dispensed by a nurse was $16!!!

Insurance may seem useless when you don't use it but living is a RISK and one accident or simply staying in the hospital an extra few days is expensive!

Think of worst case senerio and then decide if it makes sense to you.

Vicki

[lamishra]

If you are really going for the cheapest option, why not go with the squat and drop? Seriously, women have been having babies this way across the globe for hundreds of thousands of years (and still do). No doctors, no hospitals, no medicines. If you are really looking for not paying for prenatal care, childbirth or post natal care; there's your answer.

[goat1of2]

While I appreciate the humor, I do need to remind people that back at the turn of the previous century, 10% of American women DIED in childbirth! So ye olde "squat and drop" is certainly not without great risk. Anecdote time: a friend of ours, determined to do things the 'natural and beautiful' way, tried the midwife-at-home approach and was in labor for three days. Both she and her baby nearly died. Ended up at the hospital where everything was eventually made right. Yikes.

[wanderintonc]

No quality midwife would let a woman labor for three days. I had a planned homebirth and we had a backup plan to involve the hospital, if needed (it wasn't).

A homebirth is a couple thousand $. If you're uninsured, you could also try a community health center (I'm not in Raleigh yet so have no specific locations)-they would make payment plans. It'd probably also be a couple thousand. Sometimes they work with you on cost if you're uninsured.

I'm not sure pregnancy is the best time to drop insurance. You might want to keep it-even if you decide to pay cash for the birth, as least the insurance would probably cover you if you end up with much medical intervention (i.e. surgery or something).

[strawberryfield]

Oh my goodness, do not go without insurance during maternity and childbirth!! Our NICU costs for our first child (which was a totally LOW RISK birth but she could not breathe well when she came out, even though full-term) were over $75,000 (we had insurance, so our actual cost was very low).

Anything could happen to you or the baby--childbearing is not without risk.

I had both of mine w/o pain meds or intervention so theoretically they would have been really cheap--except when my first was rushed off to the NICU....