Women need more options when dealing with the emotional—and financial—cost of a lost pregnancy.
By Jessica Grose
Laurie Bertram Roberts was about 12 weeks pregnant with her third child when she thought something might be wrong. She was the married mother of twins at the time, working two jobs in Michigan City, Indiana—one in fast food, and the other as a buffet server. Because she didn’t have health insurance, she went to the ER when she noticed a pink discharge. They sent her home and told her to put her feet up. The next day, she started bleeding steadily, and she returned to the ER. Again, they told her to go home; even though the hospital had confirmed she was having a miscarriage, they would not treat her because her fetus still had a heartbeat. So she went back home. That’s when she started hemorrhaging. “I thought I was bleeding to death,” she says.
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There aren’t solid numbers on the average dollar amount that American hospitals bill for D&Cs, but Medicaid data on other procedures show surgical costs are all over the place. Uninsured women are paying between $4,000 and $9,000, according to anecdotal accounts from Susan Berke Fogel, the director of reproductive health at the National Health Law Program. Insured women are self-reporting out-of-pocket expenses between $250 and $1,200, depending on their co-payments and deductibles. Read the full article here. »
