What Does Birth Cost? Hard to Tell

By GINA KOLATA, NYT

We’re continually told that when it comes to health care, we need to be savvy and shop around for the best prices. To that end, policy experts and politicians promote health care savings accounts, saying they make “health care consumers” (a k a patients) more conscious of prices, bringing down the cost of medical care.

Here is what happened to my daughter, Therese Allison, when she tried to be just the sort of shrewd and informed patient that politicians should love.

Therese is more than seven months pregnant and uninsured — in fact, she is uninsurable. Pregnancy is a pre-existing condition, so she can’t get health insurance at any price. And now that the birth of her baby is imminent, she wants to find out what a delivery will cost, maybe even negotiate a price for this expensive procedure.

In a way, she’s lucky. She and her husband, who are self-employed, live in New Jersey, so she qualifies under a little-known and unadvertised law that caps hospital expenses for uninsured people with incomes less than five times the poverty level.

(More here.)