Mothers and their new-born children in Czechia in 2014: hospitalisation costs associated with the birth of a child with regard to the probable way of conceiving a child
Abstract
The increasingly widely used assisted reproductive technologies are associated with many uncertainties regarding not only potential health risks, but also the cost of childbirth and subsequent hospitalisation. The aim of this work is to find differences in the cost of hospitalisation for mothers and their new-born children who were most likely born following in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment and those who were not.
The analysis makes use of individual anonymized data of reported health care from the General Health Insurance Company of the Czech Republic (GHIC CR) database for mothers who gave birth in 2014 and their new-born children. The result shows that new-born children and their mothers who were likely to be pregnant as a result of IVF demonstrated higher costs associated with hospitalisation during and after birth than new-born children and their mothers for whom IVF methods were not applied.
Even if the risks that occur more frequently after the application of IVF (multiple pregnancies, low birth weight, etc.) were reduced, hospitalisation of newborn children and their mothers who underwent IVF would be less expensive, but still more expensive than hospitalisation of new-born children and mothers who did not undergo IVF.