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For the love of all that is good and pure, why on Earth would anyone think about bringing a child into the world as it is now? I’m not saying we should abandon all hope, but between the increasingly-bloated tech hellscape, environmental devastation, and political tensions, we’d all do well to spare future non-children from this particular uphill climb.
But if that’s somehow not enough and you happen to be residing in the United States, then look no further than childbirth’s accursed hospital bills as a reason for going child-free just a teensy bit longer.
TikTok‘s @devynnehaddox was one such recipient of that bill after having a baby back in January. The essentials; Devynne went into the hospital on a Wednesday and checked out on a Saturday, she got an epidural, and the birth went off without a hitch. The bill wound up costing $87,891, of which $14,706 came from the hospital stay alone.
To those of us outside the United States, that’s an utterly unthinkable price tag, and you may be wondering how it’s even possible for American children to exist outside of markedly well-to-do families. The answer is American health insurance, which I will now attempt to explain knowing full well that a highly-developed country without universal healthcare isn’t explanation.
According to healthcare.gov and Forbes, the idea seems to be that you pay a monthly fee to a health insurance provider, and you then end up paying way less than $87,891 when you have a baby, for instance. Each provider has a premium and a deductible; the premium is the monthly fee, and the deductible is the amount you need to spend out-of-pocket on your medical bills before your insurance starts kicking in, during which you typically pay between 10 to 40 percent of the expenses on average, while your insurance pays the remaining 60 to 90 percent.
Generally speaking, plans with higher deductibles have lower premiums and vice versa; a good rule of thumb is to take the lower premium if you don’t often find yourself in the hospital. A higher premium, however, would be preferable for those who spend a significant amount of time in the hospital or are anticipating a major medical procedure, such as having a child.
Alternatively, you could come to Canada, where we’ve shoehorned a universal healthcare system into a capitalist economic structure and are paying a different sort of price. But hey, it beats having to rely on a lottery ticket to have a baby.