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Interviews
Nurse Educator
Newborn Intensive Care Unit
University of Utah Hospital
Interviewer
This looks like very high-end technology. How expensive is it to treat premature infants?
Carol Henderson
You're right. It's cutting edge technology. It takes a lot of support especially for the low-birth weight patients. It takes a lot of technology. It takes a lot of equipment. It takes a lot of personnel with highly specialized training. It's very expensive therapy. The room rates vary depending on the amount of acuity for the patient, but a good starting point would probably be about $2,000 and that's just for the bed space. That's not counting all of the tests, the personnel, the consultants, the x-rays, the medications, still a lot on top of that.
Interviewer
You see a lot of extreme cases. I mean this is highly specialized care.
Exactly. The University provides services for patients along a broad spectrum. Many of our patients are without insurance. They are low-income families. We services families without insurance, maybe our homeless all the way through the people who have paid a lot of money and have invested a lot of energy and becoming pregnant through the fertility clinic here at the University, so it covers a broad spectrum.
Interviewer
How much just to walk out the door here?
Occasionally we will have patients--the younger, smaller population of course is our most expensive patients, and it's not uncommon to spend $250,000 to $300,000 and up sometimes even a million dollars on a patient. Even if you have insurance, those are pretty intimidating numbers. There are some services that help. Even with insurance those are pretty intimidating numbers. There are some special programs that can assist families but it can cost some hardships for families when you're looking at those daunting figures of a million dollars. Some of the finances that we're talking about are pretty daunting. It's not uncommon for a baby to have spent over a million dollars during his hospital stay, and even for families with insurance, that can still leave quite a hardship and a burden for families to cover.
Interviewer
I imagine that there are many difficult decisions to be made around treatment...
Our approach is to do whatever the baby needs without regard to cost and effort and it can be very difficult. It can be hard on families to face the emotional component of trying to make decisions--lifelong... that may have lifelong consequences for their infant. It's difficult to even think about the finances. People just want to do whatever it takes to do the best they can for the patient, and as a society there are some tough questions that need to be answered. Where do we put our resources? Where do we put our money and our funding? If you're that one family, all you want is a healthy child, and they'll do whatever it takes.
