Woman shocked after being charged $1.5 million in hospital bills for giving birth to triplets

Childbirth is a natural and special experience for anyone giving birth. However, if you are giving birth in the United States, it is also a very expensive process. According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation published last year, it costs about $20,000 to have a child in the country. This leaves most families across the country in a difficult position. A woman on TikTok, @the_brown_triplets, posted a video addressing the same. 

In the video, she shows how much it costs to have triplets in the country without insurance. She said that one of her babies, James, needed NICU care for 31 days. The hospital charged them $447,037 for just one child in the NICU. Her other child, Polly, was also in the NICU for 32 days and needed the same care as James, except for a little bit of oxygen and caffeine. They were charged $524,785 for Polly. While her son Baskyn was in the NICU for 35 days and needed the exact same care as Polly, the hospital charged them $481,261 for his care. In total, the hospital gave them bills worth $1.5 million for childbirth and NICU care. "This doesn’t even begin to cover my 11-day hospital stay before the babies were born," she added at the end.

People were absolutely furious about these outrageous bills and some even shared their own experiences with the cost of childbirth. A TikTok user @danicaerdman755 said, "Sounds about right. Our insurance was billed $1.6M for my twins being in the NICU for 60 days." Another user @WiscoCorgiMom shared, "My son was in the NICU for 121 days and had an ambulance ride to a bigger hospital. His total was something like $1.75-2M." 

"It's baffling to me that American Healthcare actually expects someone to pay this out of pocket," user @raisinghavoc commented. TikTok user @addyaisho said, "Imagine going to the hospital and wanting to have ur kid and they put u in debt for the rest of your life." The video has been viewed 3.8 million times and has 604k likes. According to the Kaiser Family research, the cost of childbirth in the US is more than in any other country in the world. 

It is not just the hospital bills for childbirth that are high as other kinds of hospital bills are also skyrocketing in the US. According to a 2018 Pew Research Center study, 83% of Americans, regardless of wealth, believe that high-quality medical care has become essentially expensive in the United States. Furthermore, nearly half of working-age Americans, or 41%, are struggling to pay off their medical bills and have accumulated debt over time. 

To put this in context, some people have turned to social media throughout the years to share medical bills and receipts from the past that were so low-cost that they appear almost unreal now. The bills, which vary from a $7.50 X-ray expense in 1950 to a $4.85 labor and delivery payment in 1947, indicate how prices were before they took a tragic turn less than a century ago.