What is the average medical costs for having a baby?

[acid_chipmunk]

Kids are expensive. WIC doesn't cover everything and if you can' afford to live on your own now, you can't afford to have a kid. Plus, his parents are chain smokers and you shouldn't be pregnant around that, let alone bring a child into that.

If you must have kids now, keep in mind, it will probably be upwards of 30k for the entire hospital stay, delivery, and care for the baby. And, you will have to pay a pediatrician separately to check the baby over before you can take it home. And hope that you kids don't require extra medical care after delivery like my daughter did. She spend an entire week in the hospital because she had jaundice and had to stay under the lights for 3 days.

Get good jobs, get insurance, save money, build or buy a house and THEN have kids.

 

[EmtheFishLady]

Just the fact that you are considering government programs to help you pay for your child shows you aren't ready. I agree with previous posters. Get your house built, get some insurance, get some money saved up, then reproduce. I had all of that, and we still could have been better prepared. I was diagnosed with Hyperemesis gravidarum during my pregnancy, and was hospitalized 15 times before my daughter was born. If we hadn't had money saved we'd have gone under because I couldn't work. There was no way of knowing I'd be diagnosed with it, and it made functioning day to day impossible. let alone working. I had to have IV fluids two to three times a week in the doctors office, I had to see my OBGYN a lot more than you normally would, and I even had to have a PICC line inserted. Our medical costs were almost 30,000.00 just from our OBGYN. I'm not even going to mention how much the hospital stays were. Just imagine staying in the hospital 15 separate times for up to a week and a half at a time. You can't be prepared for every medical issue that may come up during a pregnancy, so you definitely want to have insurance.

 

[elizabethbinary]

Well, according to the document I got on why they're raising my healthcare premiums:

$7,400.

(I'm not even covered for pregnancy or cihldbirth so I don't know why they felt the need to tell me this...)

 

[silkiechicken]

WITH insurance, it cost my coworkers 7k for the prenatal and natural birth with one night hospital stay. Healthy baby boy with no complications with prenatal or childbirth. Not sure how much it is costing post birth though, or how much it would have been had the pregnancy gone bad, or she needed hospital stay/post natal emergency care. They took the baby home the day after it was born.


You guys are not old to have kids, my parents were 34 and 42 when I was born, and I'm the oldest.

 

[EweSheep]

YEP!

I was on WIC and Medicaid when I found out I was pregnant and terminated from my job. Talk about a very stressful time! Townwide layoffs, jittery employers. However I lived on my own with boyfriend at that time (now hubby) and WIC does not cover everything. Just limited food and milk. Getting housing sucks we were on the waiting list and still on the waiting list for seven years!!!!! We don't need it anymore. I was 39 when I had my daughter. It costed me a couple hundred dollars out of pocket to have my daughter with emergency C section and I saw the bill $32,000 for three day stay while dd stayed in the hospital about 8 days because of blood incompatilibilty and jaudice. Good thing Medicaid paid for it and I was DONE! No more children! Got my tubes tied and don't need to have more when our jobs were unstable at the time and too many medical problems after surgery and don't need taxpayers to keep paying for more deliveries when I don't really need to have more "just to make the quota".

YEP, get jobs with insurance if you can or if your employer does not offer insurance, Medicaid will kick in. You would be responsible for any co pays, any medical expenses not covered by Medicaid/WIC and it is NOT cheap.

Get a house to move out, I certainly do NOT want people running around, yelling at us for keeping the baby up when it cries in the middle of the night and its mega stress.

Job, move or build a house and insurance. While you are waiting, get some preventive measures of not getting pregnant at this point in your lives.

 

[welsummerchicks]

Good grief. Ewesheep is my new hero.

WOW.

 

[EmtheFishLady]

Another thing, child care is EXPENSIVE. If you both work, that's a HUGE chunk of your paycheck each week. I'm lucky enough to own my own business and can stay at home with our daughter, but at the time of my pregnancy I was also working a full time job. We figured the costs of child care and my working part time instead of full time, it wasn't worth it. My paycheck would have gone straight to child care. ALL OF IT. So I quit, and just run my business now. You need to consider that though, because you're either going to have an added expense or a loss of income.

 

[Chick_In_The_Burbs]

I got a generic estimate from a nurse at our local hospital, between 20-30k for a delivery.

Hospitals often will offer payment plans and deals if you go to their payments office and negociate for all care in advance.

And then there's midwives and birthing centers...

 

[EweSheep]

Yeah and the smartest decision I've ever made! It was a very selfish thing for us to do that.

 

[EweSheep]

Quote:
That is why my mother quit work to take care of us when we were growing up. Dad and mom was figuring it out and everything, I mean, everything that Mom made, went to daycare for me and sis. I am a stay at home mom and it works out quite well!