A hospital charged a woman $39.35 for “Skin to Skin” after a C-section (2016)

It's a charge for the extra nurse, but the level of specificity required for billing doesn't allow for a normal line item like that.

You would think, for example, that "contact with nonvenomous marine animal" was already crazy specific, and didn't need further breakdown, right? Nope. http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/V00-Y99/W50-W64/W56-/...

The hospital and various people working in the industry have explained the reasons. This story went out of proportions because everyone was busy being outraged and no one wanted an explanation. The father himself tried to calm people down by saying he wasn't outraged and he doesn't find it unreasonable but that too was ignored by some media outlets.

“During a caesarean, many people become shaky, nauseous, uncomfortable, even faint. These are normal physiological reactions. In order to facilitate skin to skin in the OR, an extra nurse needs to be available to assist. And before people scream that ‘there’s a nurse for the baby’, there is, but that nurse has other responsibilities in the OR. They aren’t either holding the baby or twiddling their thumbs. So yes, an extra nurse is needed.” [0]

“Only in the case of a C-section birth is an additional nurse brought into the operating room,” the statement said. [1]

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[0]https://blogs.babycenter.com/mom_stories/why-you-might-get-c...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/business/how-much-is-it-w...

I know we're pretty adjusted to not knowing how much going to the doctor is going to take out of our wallet, but that's ridiculous considering how important to us that is just about everywhere else (e-commerce, Bank fees, phone bills).

Can't find the reference, but I read that general practitioners barely even know how much they're going to be reimbursed for care. It takes their staff an average of three back and forths with the insurance company to settle on the "appropriate" coding and billing for anything of a "moderate complexity" visit or above.

Shameless plug mode:

My employer (Rally Health) has a provider search and cost transparency tool you can access if you have a UHC health plan at https://connect.werally.com . It has uses information about your plan to estimate cost for procedures and even multi-stage treatments.

To be fair this doesn't really solve the problem of unnecessary complexity behind the scenes of healthcare which are actually responsible for driving up costs, but it does help consumers in the current state of things.