| > INOVA in Northern Virginia charges $3000 for an uncomplicated vaginal birth. In Germany all of that is being covered by the government insurance scheme. The only thing you have to pay is stuff like a private room for postnatal recovery time [1]. Oh and you get a very long time paid post birth to recover and bond with your child. No such nonsense as giving birth and having to work the next day like it's common in the US. > If you have insurance your maximum cost out of pocket for the calendar year is between 5 and 15 thousand dollars (insurance covers everything above it). We don't have that at all, insurance covers everything, you never even see a bill or have to deal with stuff like "in network". The only thing is a 5-10€ co-pay per prescription (utter nonsense if you ask me, it was introduced as a "cost control" measure to prevent people from... diverting medication? idk, it's ridiculous but small enough that it's harmless). > Bankruptcy is much more problematic in Europe for the individual. Americans can keep their assets in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Agreed on that one. It's also a huge contributing factor into why Americans have it easier to start up side hustles. > Health insurance in America costs between $500-$1000 a month for an entire family. Assuming I were the sole earner and my wife would be a SAHM with an arbitrary number of children, I'd (at a gross wage of 52k/y) pay 340€ a month to health insurance and my employer another 340€, so in total (including a per-insurance surcharge of, in my case, .5%) my healthcare costs are capped at about 700€ - for all of us. On top of that we'd get, like all parents in Germany, "Kindergeld" of 250€/month per childpaid by the government to assist in child rearing. Pretty awesome if you ask me. I honestly don't know how y'all survive. [1] https://www.eltern.de/kosten-geburt |
Ok, but you agree, don't you, that $3000 is quite different from "parents have to pay five digits worth of money just for the birth of a child"? That is off by an order of magnitude.
> No such nonsense as giving birth and having to work the next day like it's common in the US.
I think you should stop consuming so much media from Russia Today :) Or maybe re-consider the trustworthiness of wherever you read that.
The fact is that, at the federal level, Americans may take 12 weeks (unpaid) time off work after giving birth under the FMLA, and it is prohibited to retaliate against an employee for taking that time.
Additionally, the majority of Americans live in states which mandate paid time off after giving birth, (usually 8 to 12 weeks) plus additional unpaid time. California, to use the most populous state as an example, mandates 8 weeks of paid time, plus 28 weeks unpaid. New York, on the opposite side of the country, goes even farther by mandating 12 weeks paid time.
Part of the reason you may be confused is that this is not always explicitly named as "maternity time". It is often called as "disability leave", and nearly all disability statutes include recovery from pregnancy as a disability.
Unless you are maybe trying to argue that Europeans are legally prohibited to work the day after giving birth, you are way off base here.