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Employers are continuing to spend more on bringing people to life.
The median cost of a birth at employer plans and other commercial payers increased to $17,990 in 2023, according to FAIR Health, a health care cost data organization.
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The 2023 median was 3.8% higher than the 2022 median and 14% higher than the 2020 median.
The FAIR Health total includes 40 weeks of prenatal care, the day of delivery and one year of care provided after the delivery.
Analysts at the organization based their findings on a review of data sifted from a repository that holds 47 billion commercial health care claim records.
The median increase in cost caused by the presence of any potential complication was $3,938.
Diabetes is common during pregnancy, and it had an especially big effect on 2023 birth spending. For plan members who had diabetes before they became pregnant, median birth-related costs were $9,125 higher than for plan members with no potential complications.
About 2.5% of plan members who had babies in 2022 had preexisting diabetes. Another 11% developed gestational diabetes while they were pregnant, and 1% had diabetes that could not be classified either as gestational or preexisting.
Some other factors that can increase plan spending on pregnancy are age and obesity. The average age of the mothers involved increase 0.3 years between 2020 and 2023, to 31.7 years.
In 2023, 19.7% of the mothers were obese.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
