By VANESSA HURLEY
What if I told you that across the country there’s a procedure being performed on pregnant women that makes their newborns more likely to end up sick and in a $3,000-a-day Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)?
Too outrageous to believe?
It’s true.
Early elective delivery ‚ when labor is induced 3 to 4 weeks early without medical necessity , is on the rise in the U.S. According to a report released in January 2011 by the Leapfrog Group, between 1992 and 2003 the number of these births increased from 19% to 29%. Seven hospitals across the country perform these deliveries on 100% of women without medical necessity, and over thirty others perform them 50% of the time or more.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has long recognized the risks associated with inducing labor when it is not medically needed. One retrospective study found that infants born at 37 weeks are nearly 23 times more likely to suffer severe respiratory distress than those born between 39 and 41 weeks. ACOG thinks this is unacceptable.
So why do hospitals do it? Experts see a few possible explanations:
- Obstetricians deliver but don’t care for newborns. They move quickly from birth to birth, and lack a complete understanding of the complications associated with early deliveries.
- Natural deliveries are difficult to anticipate. Nature can be fickle and tends to ignore the schedules of busy physicians. Patients may simply agree because they see little harm in early deliveries.
There’s yet another incentive worth pondering. It’s prefaced by a big green $, and followed by plenty of zeros. NICUs – where many pre-term babies end up – are highly profitable for hospitals. John Lantos, a former Chief of General Pediatrics at the University of Chicago, recently wrote in Health Affairs:
The NICU – which represented nearly 4 percent of total admissions [for the hospital] ‚Äì had generated 11 percent of the net revenue. Since most of the academic medical center’s divisions either barely broke even or lost money, that meant that a staggering 69 percent of the net profits of the entire hospital system came from the 4 percent of hospital admissions to the NICU.
In other words, healthy, full-term babies are not nearly as profitable as preemies. The average cost of caring for a premature baby is $41,610 versus just $2,830 for a full term baby. A clear line can be drawn between more early term births and more days spent (and dollars generated) in the NICU. Increasing the numbers of preterm births creates a perceived need for additional NICU beds, thereby increasing the need to fill those beds. A self perpetuating cycle quickly emerges.Continue reading…
