My wife is about to start at a new employer, and, like her current employer, offers health insurance which really only provides coverage for services rendered by their health system. I could find the exact percentages but it's essentially a we-don't-cover-anything-outside-of-our-very-small-network setup. This would require that she change her OB, have her coworkers deliver any children, etc. (feels like a HIPAA violation but I'm sure there's some exclusion for this), and also have us switch our child's pediatrician from a long time family friend to someone new.
I told her we should consider just staying with current doctors and just paying cash, but it's an arduous process actually getting a cash price out of any of these places for various services to really shop it. And based on the total bill for our last child's normal delivery with one night's stay being about $40,000, I don't know if using out of network services for everything would really work. Alternatively, I could switch her and our child to my employer's insurance which is not tied to a specific hospital network, but it's completely unsubsidized and the entire cost of insurance with my employer would come out of my check, and further the coverage is pretty poor, so that option is not very enticing.
I'm sure many of y'all are with hospitals that offer similar only-within-our-system type coverage, what do you do in your situations? Simply use your own facility's services? Pay cash and go elsewhere? Something else?
Thanks!!!
I told her we should consider just staying with current doctors and just paying cash, but it's an arduous process actually getting a cash price out of any of these places for various services to really shop it. And based on the total bill for our last child's normal delivery with one night's stay being about $40,000, I don't know if using out of network services for everything would really work. Alternatively, I could switch her and our child to my employer's insurance which is not tied to a specific hospital network, but it's completely unsubsidized and the entire cost of insurance with my employer would come out of my check, and further the coverage is pretty poor, so that option is not very enticing.
I'm sure many of y'all are with hospitals that offer similar only-within-our-system type coverage, what do you do in your situations? Simply use your own facility's services? Pay cash and go elsewhere? Something else?
Thanks!!!

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