How to Buy a Better Birth
Prognosis: Misconception
Bloomberg
4.1 • 838 Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2020
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The average cost of having a baby in the United States is $11,000 for people on private health insurance. But the price tag can vary by tens of thousands of dollars, depending on what hospital you go to and what doctor you see. And high-price medical care isn’t necessarily better: In the U.S., regardless of how much they or their insurance company pays, women experience unexpected problems related to pregnancy and childbirth at alarming rates.
The problem, of course, isn’t limited to maternity costs. Across the health-care system, wide differences in price and quality for the same procedures have led many economists and policymakers to conclude that the marketplace for medical care is broken. This week on Prognosis, we look at one health plan’s attempt to make it work better. It’s pushing hospitals to improve maternity care while keeping costs in check. These efforts bring to light a lot about what’s wrong with American health care, and one ambitious attempt to fix it.
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| 0:00.0 | The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. |
| 0:04.8 | So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. |
| 0:11.5 | Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. |
| 0:16.1 | You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. |
| 0:19.1 | A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. |
| 0:23.2 | Follow the Big Take podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. |
| 0:32.3 | Having a baby in America is expensive. |
| 0:43.3 | By one measure, the average cost for a normal delivery in the United States is $11,000. That's more than twice as much as in Switzerland. |
| 0:46.3 | It's even more expensive than the deluxe suite in the private wing of a London hospital, |
| 0:51.3 | where Kate Middleton and other British royals have given birth. |
| 0:55.9 | And in the U.S., the price can vary wildly depending on what hospital you go to, even within the same city. |
| 1:03.7 | You might think that the high price would mean the care is superior, but that's not the case. |
| 1:09.0 | The United States health care system has alarming rates of poor outcomes for mothers and their newborns. |
| 1:15.7 | Welcome to Prognosis, Bloomberg's podcast about the future of health care. |
| 1:20.4 | I'm your host, Michelle Fay-Cortez. |
| 1:23.4 | Americans pay higher prices than people in other countries for similar medical services, |
| 1:28.2 | and the most expensive services are not necessarily the best. |
| 1:33.0 | Bloomberg News health reporter John Tossey looked at one health plan |
| 1:36.0 | that's trying to use the millions of dollars it spends each year on births |
| 1:40.0 | to lower costs and improve outcomes from others. |
| 1:48.9 | Music to lower costs and improve outcomes from others. Sarah Rothstein pays for a lot of babies. |
| 1:52.9 | Well, she doesn't pay herself, but the health plan she runs does. |
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