I would like to say WOO HOO!!!! My wife and I just had our second child, another little girl join our family on Jan. 2nd. Of course we knew this was coming and had planned for it, but I might have missed out. Well I know I missed out on the 2013 tax break by a measly 34 hours, Grrrrrr. However, the bigger miss was on our insurance, we have a high deductible plan with HSA, when the planning began we would have had about $5,000 in the account when she was born, but an ER visit, and a few early maternity bills hit last year and we only have about $1,200 in the account right now. The deductible is $2,400 with a max out of pocket of $8,000. I haven't gotten all of the bills in yet, but from what I'm finding online the hospital will charge insurance just over $30,000 for the C-Section and other cost for the 3 days we were in for. It looks like we will be out the maximum of $8,000, we do have the money in a bank account that we'd started for this and for a home down payment we started last year so it isn't a worry on how we will pay for it, but darn $8,000! Well the idea came to me that I could have signed my wife up for a secondary insurance with a lower deductible (to go into effect Jan. 1st), then cancel the plan a month or two later. I didn't feel right about this so I decided not to do it even if it would save us a ton of money. Does anyone else have any advise on what we could have done, or could do to help lower this bill? I only started reading this site after we were already pregnant and didn't think to ask it before now, but let me have it face punches, groin kicks and all.
JB