Charlotte – Washington

Charlotte’s Story

For my first child, I was unable to acquire marketplace health insurance due to my income being too high. I was a self-employed musician living in Seattle making about 30k a year and my husband was making under 60k at the time. Of course I spent many hours completing the online application after friends and family kept telling me “just get Obamacare, it will cover everything!” So I had a home birth and paid for it completely out of pocket, which came to about $4500 after all was said and done. Interestingly, when it came time to get my labs done, I was told they would be $1200 dollars, and maybe I could get it down to $900 if I told them I was indigent. I asked them what it would be if I just paid cash on site, and I was able to get the tests I needed done for about $120. Since I wasn’t involving insurance, I was also able to choose exactly which tests I needed “buffet style” rather than getting extra tests that didn’t pertain to my pregnancy. For my second birth, I did have insurance through my husband’s employer. The reimbursal process was a time-consuming headache that took months. The insurance company did not want to cover my midwife even though my home birth cost thousands of dollars less than the average birth in my state. Eventually they did cover a portion of the birth itself, but of course covered none of the holistic aspects of my prenatal care which I consider essential to the success of pregnancy.