For as long as we’ve existed as a species, the process of giving birth has been a painful, tense, and uncertain one.
After all, giving birth can cause some dramatic shifts in a person’s body even when everything goes to plan, but nature also has a way of laughing in the face of even our most careful planning.
And so some moms can sometimes find themselves suddenly giving birth in cars and parking lots, while others end up having to undergo emergency caesarean sections due to complications.
But just in case childbirth wasn’t already scary enough on its own, one mom’s staggering hospital bill reveals another avenue of worry even after all is said and done.
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In the fall of 2020, Shannon Mayor of northern California left her tech job to start her own business, but this career move would become more complicated when she became pregnant.
As she told Insider, that was because she found herself having to switch insurance providers and then switching again to her husband’s provider just a week before her baby was born.
But while this was a stressful process for her, it’s also one that she now feels fortunate she was able to do at all.
As Mayor put it, “Insurance is complicated. It’s not easy in this country to figure out, and you can be screwed if you don’t, you know, really think ahead.”
And just how screwed she might have been didn’t dawn on her until she received the bill for her week-long hospital stay while she was giving birth.
As we can see, she only ended up having to pay $250 of the total amount, but it would have been a very different story if she had no insurance or if the hospital was out of network for her.
Because if either of those possibilities had come to pass, Mayor would have been on the hook for over $50,000.
In her words, “When you think about the average person, who has $50,000 sitting around to have a baby? That’s like a down payment on a house in some places.”
And it’s clear that the bill total resonated with viewers the world over, as her TikTok detailing the invoice has amassed approximately 8.9 million views at the time of this writing.
And while one parent whose daughter was in the NICU for two months said their bill added up to $1.5 million, stunned users from other countries reported only paying the equivalent of $50.
As Mayor said, “I think it’s cool that it’s sparked a lot of conversation about universal health care. We have a lot of people coming in from other countries talking about their experiences.”
With that in mind, Mayor now hopes her video compels people to “really question our systems and how things are working.”
h/t: Insider
