Our total bill for a normal delivery was 25k. 25k for a doctor and nurse to pull a baby out of the vag!

It took 2 months for the bill to arrive.

Healthcare in US is like legal extortion. You could literally bill for breathing hospital air and people would have to pay.

>You could literally bill for breathing hospital air and people would have to pay.

Don't be ridiculous. You'd be billed for air and hospital odor separately!

Though I should note that a delivery is usually more complex than simply waiting there for the little one to fall out, there is some after care and such that is being performed plus the doctor is usually not that cheap either. (They have a lot of student debt to pay off after all)

Their liability insurance has to cover the costs of lifetime care for any babies that are injured during delivery (juries have made this clear enough). It's not strange that they pass this cost on to mothers.

Medical billing is a nightmare. I have HMO insurance (which means the process should be really streamlined - everything is in-house) and I once tried to figure out why certain rather simple bill item was billed certain cost. It took about three weeks, multiple calls and emails, and speaking to several people, to get to the stage where they said "this is probably because if it was classified as code X, though we can not give you rules why it is code X and not code Y, and there's no way to know upfront which it would be, we'll just send you the bill later and you pay whatever we say" and even then they couldn't answer why sometimes they billed certain percentage upfront and sometimes another, so that you end up getting different pre-payments and different bills for the same thing. This whole thing is an ungodly mess.