My babies have been in the NICU two weeks tomorrow for the normal keeping warm, feeding and growing of a 35 week preemie and get to come home tomorrow as well-yay!!!
Does anyone know a round about figure the NICU is per day? I'm dreading the bill even though we have insurance and critical care insurance on top of that.
Re: Average cost of NICU per day?
Wow that's pretty darn cheap. My hospital stay alone (7 day total) was billed out at $35,000. I should be getting our son's NICU bill any day now....I am very interested to see what it is.
I remember LO's NICU room and board were around 11,000/day. That was just the hospital part...the neonatologists were over 1,000/day on top of that. I do remember the Special Care nursery was a lot cheaper once he was well enough to go there, maybe half the cost.
It was a lot for 35 day stay. It seems like my insurance was paying out over $60,000 to the hospital. Luckily, we qualified for K01 Medicaid since he was in the hospital over 30 days.
As well, with my Labor and Delivery bill, it has suddenly became difficult to pay for this bill since we are paying for babysitter plus other baby expenses. So the hospital sent me an application for financial assistance, and we are applying for it (they said if approved that it would cover 40-60% of the labor and delivery expense if we are approved based on our income).
We are also on a WIC program that gives us checks for food for Breastfeeding and Baby Formula. I am really glad that I talked to the social workers at the hospital before my LO left and got as much information on any programs that could help us out.
Rowen Alexander born 10 weeks early 1/28/07
www.4wquestions.blogspot.com
So happy for you ...you get to take your babies home tomorrow. I told the doc today; must send us home friday....or I'm taking them AMA. (no joke) and they may not believe this RN mama, until she walks right out that door with 2 girls. They are very ready to go.....
I'm worried about our bill. 2 weeks for my bill....and....almost 5 weeks for the girls.
My DS's 48 day NICU stay was 250,000.
Eta- that was just for the hospital portion. The Neo doctors charged 450.00 a day, except for the first day, which was billed at 3,500. Once we moved off NEO's care and to a Ped (around 4 weeks), they charged 150.00 a day. The childrens hospital group, who rounded when my Ped was not in house charged 250 a day. Plus, we had misc. bills from radiologists, G.I. and the eye doctors. Thank goodness for insurance, although we still had to pay a lot out of pocket.
Aidens total for everything came out to $16,500 per day. Including Neonatologists, X-rays, Labs, medication, hospital stay etc.
THIS! LO had a 63 day NICU stay and her grand total for the hospital alone was $308,000. On top f that, the neonatologists' bill was an additional $49,000 or so. This was for a normal NICU course with no surgeries and fairly basic tests...I can't imagine what it would have been if she had had any complications that required surgical intervention. That did not include my delivery and hospital stay.
That being said, LO was in the top NICU in the state, the rooms were semi private (only 1 or 2 babies to each room) and the staff was amazing! Still, I'm REALLY glad insurance covered most of it!