American Women Pay More to Give Birth than British Royalty—But Receive Worse Care

This is a sad commentary on the myth of "American Excellence". Americans pay around double what the other industrialized nations pay, per person, for health care, yet America is ranked twenty-sixth in the World for the quality of health care it's citizens receive.

From Sy Mukherjee's article at Think Progress:


"On Tuesday, Elizabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times  tweetedout, “British royal born in fanciest ward :$15000. Average US birth: billed $30,000; paid $18,000. What’s wrong here?” Rosenthal has her numbers right — and to answer her question, what’s wrong is that the U.S. system of medical care charges patients on a fee-for-service basis without giving consumers transparent pricing information. Worse yet, Americans don’t even receive particularly high-quality maternal care in exchange for their outsized medical bills.

Rosenthal’s tweet leads to a  detailed analysis she did for the New York Times in June. She found that hospitals charge about $30,000 for a vaginal delivery and newborn care, and C-sections cost closer to $50,000. Insurers only pay $18,000 to $28,000 on average for those services — and out-of-pocket costs for women with insurance, which used to be almost nothing, have risen to an average of $3,400 today:

The biggest reason for this disparity is the American medical culture, in which doctors have a perverse incentive to perform as many procedures as possible since they can bill for each test and treatment.

For instance, the American Academy of Family physicians released a list of 90 most common unnecessary procedures that  includes expensive C-section deliveries for healthy women before 39 weeks of pregnancy. Consumer groups  point out that the rates of these C-sections have skyrocketed without many discernible health benefits, as have ultrasounds after 24 weeks of pregnancy, and early epidurals.

But for all the money that Americans spend on maternity care, newborns in the United States still die at a higher rate than babies in other industrialized nations. In fact, Save the Children  found that 11,300 U.S. babies die on their first day of life, which is a 50 percent higher first-day mortality rate than all other industrialized countries included in its study combined. 

[READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT ALTERNET]