It was a beautiful moment for Ryan Grassley and his wife when their son was born in a Utah hospital on September 4th.
That was, until, Grassley received an unrelated charge on his bill for $39.35 with the description- “skin to skin after C-sec.” Grassley thought the charge which appeared to be for holding his baby to his wife’s chest was a joke. But once he posted a picture of the bill on Reddit, people started going crazy.
Grassley, who is from Spanish Fork, Utah, wrote that after his wife had delivered their baby, he was asked if they would like to hold their newborn after the C-section at Utah Valley Hospital. Grassley held his son between his wife’s neck and chest, and a nurse took pictures.
The description on the bill seemed to suggest that he was charged the fee for holding his child.
According to the New York Times, Janet Frank, a spokeswoman for the hospital, said in a statement that the charge was not for skin-to-skin contact. Instead, it was incurred because an extra nurse was needed in the operating room while Grassley and his wife held their newborn son and that the nurse’s presence was necessary to ensure that “both mom and baby remain safe.”
“Only in the case of a C-section birth is an additional nurse brought into the operating room,” the statement said.
Grassley expected that his wife’s C-section would be costly, and it was, totaling $13,280.49 before payments and adjustments. “We knew what we were signing up for and have some money saved up,” he wrote, adding: “Everyone involved in the process was great, and we had a positive experience. We just got a chuckle out of seeing that on the bill.”
While Frank would not initially say whether the hospital itself had set the price for the nurse that Mr. Grassley was charged for, she confirmed by email that the hospital set the charge, which was determined as, “a function of nursing time.”
After the experience, Grassley created a GoFundMe page saying that if he received $39, he would use it to pay the “ridiculous” hospital charge.
Have you ever seen a charge like this on your hospital bill?
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[Featured Image Credit: Ryan Grassley via GoFundMe]
Dad Explains Why Hospital Charged Him $40 To Hold His Newborn Baby is an article from: LifeDaily