As Grace Griffin and her husband were welcoming their long-awaited baby — a daughter — Griffin found herself worried about looming medical bills and unsure whether the family could pay for the care needed. "This whole experience has me wondering (keeping me up at night, actually): Can we ever afford to have another child?" Grace and Daniel Griffin, both 26, knew money would be tight once they had their first child. So, even before the Calumet, Mich., couple tried to conceive, they began crunching the numbers to figure out the cost of pregnancy.
"We wanted to save up enough to pay for those medical bills right away, if possible," Grace said. But the cost estimator that she found linked to her UnitedHealthcare student plan asked for medical billing codes for each procedure that Grace was likely to receive. That's information she didn't have.
So, she kept digging until she found the Summary of Benefits and Coverage information on the health plan's website, which estimated out-of-pocket costs for a routine pregnancy and delivery at about $2,700. "We thought, 'OK, that's doable,'" she said. "We should be able to save up that much and pay for that out of pocket." But as the expenses piled up, it was clear the estimate wasn't even close.
Early in the pregnancy, Grace met her $500 deductible, the out-of-pocket cost she had to pay before insurance pitched in. Her plan also required her to pay 20% coinsurance for in-network care. This meant that for every $100 billed for things like routine blood work and other needed care, she was on the hook for $20.
"When I started getting lab work is when we started realizing expenses would add up quickly," Grace said. Routine blood tests to check iron levels or for gestational diabetes were a couple of hundred dollars every visit, she said. In June, after what Grace described as a routine pregnancy and delivery, the couple welcomed their daughter.
Then the Griffins received an "explanation of benefits" notice that showed the hospital charged about $18,000 for the delivery, with the family on the hook for a sizable portion. "I thought, 'Oh no, it's going to be a lot,'" she said. "Much more than we budgeted for." In early October, Grace said, her family's out-of-pocket expenses had totaled more than $9,000, over three times the general estimate published by her insurer for pregnancy-related costs.
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