Expecting a Baby? Five Tips To Help You Prepare for Pregnancy Costs

(Oona Zenda/KFF Health News) As Grace Griffin and her husband were welcoming their long-awaited baby — a daughter — Griffin found herself worried about looming medical bills and unsure if their family could pay for the care they needed. “This whole experience has me wondering (keeping me up at night, actually): Can we ever afford to have another child?” — Grace Griffin, Calumet, Michigan Grace and Daniel Griffin, both 26, knew money would be tight once they had their first child. So, even before the Calumet, Michigan, couple tried to conceive, they began crunching the numbers to figure out the cost of pregnancy. “We wanted to save up enough to pay for those medical bills right away, if possible,” Grace said. But the cost estimator she found linked to her UnitedHealthcare student plan asked for medical billing codes for each procedure Grace was likely to receive. That’s information she didn’t have. So, she kept digging until she found the Summary of Benefits and Coverage information on the health plan’s website, which estimated out-of-pocket costs for a routine pregnancy and delivery at about $2,700. “We thought, ‘OK, that’s doable,’” she said. “We should be able to save up that muc...