A Concord Monitor Article - Your News Source - Concord NH 03301
April 24th, 2007 — BekahCarol Leonard, Hopkinton
Apr 24, 2007
In response to Jim Roche’s incredibly myopic April 22 Sunday Monitor “My Turn,” “We can’t afford more health-care mandates” (including midwifery services), please bear with me and do the following math quiz:
There are 18 licensed midwives doing homebirths in New Hampshire. If each does only one birth a month (most do many more), that’s 216 births per year.
The website nhhealthcost.org states that a local hospital is charging roughly $15,000 for a normal, spontaneous vaginal delivery. Multiply 216 homebirths times the $15,000 hospital facility fee and you get $3.24 million.
The same website states that physician fees at this local hospital for low-risk birth and new baby paid by insurance companies (after a $500 deductible) were $8,484; and 216 times $8,484 equals $1.83 million.
New Hampshire Certified Midwives’ total fee for the same low-risk birth (including prenatal care, birth, OB equipment/supplies, postpartum care) is $3,000. Having the same 216 babies delivered by midwives would have saved insurance companies $1.18 million.
Low-risk birth at a local hospital: $24,315. Same low-risk birth at home with a certified midwife: $3,000. The total insurance companies would save in both practitioner charges and facility fees is $5.07 million in just one year if those babies had been born at home with certified midwives.
So, yes, the midwives bill is a dreaded insurance mandate, but if legislators vote yes on SB 131, they can think out of the box and get an A-plus on the math quiz above.
CAROL LEONARD
Hopkinton
(The writer is a certified midwife and a lobbyist for the New Hampshire Midwives Association.)
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