 Healthcare providers including midwives are paid by insurance or government payers through a system of reimbursement. After you provide maternity and other women’s health services, your client’s insurance provider sends a bill to whoever is responsible for covering his/her medical costs. Some independent practice owners avoid the complex maze of healthcare reimbursement altogether by simply choosing not to accept insurance. Instead, they bill patients directly and avoid the administrative burden of submitting claims and appealing denials. Choosing to be in network with payers does allow midwives to tap into the Affordable Care Act coverage of 100% coverage for preventative services even if deductive hasn’t been met yet. The challenge with that model is private midwives are not offering an assembly line hospital-based model of care to sustain that low reimbursement rate. Most midwives need to get paid other ways to continue personalized, high-quality care in their community’s long term.
For a midwife, the cost varies greatly by location, birth setting, type of insurance payers, experience of biller, and financial operational systems put into place with their practice. In the hospital setting, average cost of a midwife in network with insurance is around $2,000. Most midwives in out of hospital setting are cash or out of network with insurance companies. It is very difficult to serve 4-6 clients a month on $2,000 per client with our time, driving, overhead expenses, and staffing. National average for midwifery care costs in 2022 is $4,500 cash and insurance reimbursement varying greatly from $3,500-25,000 (average being $8,000). There is a significant difference in pay based on the biller that the midwife uses. If they are doing claims themselves or hiring an inexperienced biller with midwifery services, many aren’t familiar with all the billable charges and how to negotiate with an insurance company. We aren’t just providing global maternity care. We include 24/7 call availability, home visits, continuous support during labor and birth, newborn care, birth assistant, tubs, birth supplies, breastfeeding support, counseling, primary care, gynecological services, well women care, and contraception counseling. All of those services have financial value and translate into billable charges with insurance companies. With Midwives Advantage, our midwives are seeing significantly higher reimbursement than the national average, because we are the national experts in out of hospital midwifery billing services. We have hundreds of midwives pooling together to get the best of the best contracts and our team of highly experienced billers know they value terms to negotiate with payers. Most of our clients are based on referrals from other highly satisfied midwives that were billing on their own or another biller getting paid minimal for the amazing care they were providing. Once you make the switch to us, it is hard to use any other billing company once you can see the reimbursement potential that is out there for midwives! Additional Resources https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jmwh.13271 https://www.midwife.org/Medicaid-Coverage-and-Reimbursement https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34596945/ https://www.medicinenet.com/doula_vs_midwife/article.html |
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