I did have the baby by the way, and hurray that we're doing great!
We have good insurance so our out of pocket for the birth center birth was to be $960. On the budget, money saved in an envelope, done! But then to have the ultrasound done, at the outpatient lab of the hospital because none of the imaging centers in town do obstetric ultrasound, $300 because it's under a hospital and that's how our insurance company handles things done in a hospital. And because he's a male child and we subscribe to circumcision we had to make a million calls to find a pediatrician that would 1) do a circumsision, 2) do it in the first 2 weeks, 3) even see a baby not born in a hospital for the firs 2 months... And we finally did.
Today I went to that pediatrician and things were fine. Then I got home and they called to say that the baby needed blood work done and I had to take him to the hospital. Sheesh I guess I'm just cheap because I don't want to pay hospital rates for a lab. So I called the lab my insurance covers, and they also said the test had to be done in the hospital. And I called the insurance company and they said if the hospital does it, it will be subject to dreaded hospital charges. Back and forth, also with the midwife because I was 99% certain that the blood work was the standard newborn stuff she was going to do tomorrow. But the pediatrician's office was doing a good job of following up, aka it felt like they were hounding me, to have orders sent to the hospital 45 minutes away, which would have the same hospital rates as the hospital 15 minutes away.
It's lovely that with G, for all that we had problems later, we didn't have to deal with all this crazy stuff when he was born. G-town was better set up for hippy types like me. The pediatrician I went to worked with the birth center and it was all good.
1 comment:
I well remember those hoops. Although it was not too bad with Owain. We actually couldn't take him to a pediatrician because we were on Medicaid, but we took him to the (reallly very good) Children's Hospital Clinic near our house. The doctor there discussed the various tests that they do for newborns, and most of them had either been done by our midwife or we did them there. We did go into the hospital for the hearing test.
The birth certificate was a ridiculous hilarity, though.
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