By Jennifer Jane, BSN, RN
Pregnancy brings enough surprises without the inevitable, unknown medical bills. Yet most parents say they begin prenatal care and head into childbirth with no idea what they’ll be paying. Not for lack of trying — it’s a system-level transparency problem. Even the tools that claim to offer price clarity often leave parents-to-be guessing at costs. Pregnancy is a nine-month journey with separate billing for OB office visits, labs, ultrasounds, specialized tests, specialist visits, hospital delivery, and newborn care.
Several well-known transparency tools promise clarity — Healthcare Bluebook, Castlight Health, and ClearHealthCosts, among them. In 2019, hospitals were required to post prices for consumers on their websites, but they did not provide patients with useful information, such as their out-of-pocket costs for services (1).
Each serves a purpose, but none of them were designed for pregnancy. Lyvona was created for pregnancy and birth costs, and the difference becomes obvious the moment you start comparing what each tool can (and can’t) do.
Let’s talk about what sets these tools apart — and why Lyvona is quickly becoming the most useful resource for expectant parents who need meaningful, accurate cost guidance.
1. Most Transparency Tools Aren’t Built for Consumers — Including Pregnant Women
Most cost transparency tools primarily serve employers, benefits administrators, and insurance brokers. Their goal is to evaluate provider value and steer groups toward cost-efficient options. That’s useful on the business side of healthcare, but for individuals trying to prepare for real-life bills, the result is a tool that doesn’t address their needs.
Many pregnant women have never heard of these platforms because they aren’t designed to reach them. A 2021 analysis of consumer healthcare shopping behavior found that even when cost tools exist, individuals rarely use them unless they are tailored to their specific care journey, are easy to understand, and personalized (2).
Lyvona solves this fundamental usability gap. It isn’t a corporate wellness dashboard or employer analytics tool. It’s a platform built specifically for cost clarity around pregnancy and birth for expecting and new parents.
2. Single-Procedure Price Tools Don’t Work for Pregnancy
Healthcare Bluebook, Castlight Health, and ClearHealthCosts all rely on one core capability: comparing prices for individual procedures, such as an MRI, CT scan, or colonoscopy. They show you a local price range, and that’s about it.
Of course, pregnancy is not a single procedure. It’s a long chain of care: prenatal visits, routine lab tests, ultrasounds, optional genetic tests, glucose screening test, labor and delivery, anesthesia, newborn care, and postpartum visits. Every step is billed separately, often by different providers.
The single-procedure price tool framework can’t model:
- What happens when you receive prenatal care in November, then your deductible resets in January
- How your obstetrician, hospital, anesthesiologist, neonatologist, and pediatric provider all bill separately
- How your baby becomes a new patient with their own claims the moment they are born
- NIPT (noninvasive prenatal testing), carrier testing, amniocentesis, and chorionic villus sampling. Results of these can lead to a branching decision tree. When one result is abnormal, it can lead to multiple additional labs, tests, or specialists. A single-procedure tool addresses each test in isolation, when in reality, very little occurs in isolation in pregnancy.
- High-risk care and complications: Gestational diabetes, hypertension, preeclampsia, placenta previa, hyperemesis. Each creates a new set of monitoring, medications, ultrasounds, and specialist visits. None of that emerges from a one-code-one-price lookup. You’d need a model that understands your whole clinical pathway.
Lyvona is the only tool that treats pregnancy as the complex path it is. Lyvona’s cost modeling doesn’t show you one number — it can map out the entire arc of pregnancy, prenatal to delivery to newborn billing.
3. Other Tools Don’t Handle Calendar-Year Transitions — Lyvona Does
Pregnancy ignores the convenience of staying contained in one calendar year. Most insurance deductibles are strictly bound to calendar-year cycles and renew on January 1st.
This mismatch creates an anxiety-producing, expensive surprise for expectant parents — the double-deductible scenario. Your prenatal care begins in one year. Your baby is due in the next year. Your deductible resets in January, and you pay it all over again.
Most transparency tools don’t model this. They show a price, not a timeline.
Lyvona does. You can model a due date of January 3 versus December 29 and see how your financial responsibility changes — visually, clearly, and in dollars you can plan for. No other transparency tool offers calendar-year intelligence shaped specifically for pregnancy.
4. Other Tools Don’t Address Baby’s Separate Billing — Lyvona Does
Your baby becomes a separate patient with their own claims, providers, and cost-sharing as soon as they’re born. Many parents only discover this after receiving a surprise newborn care bill.
Tools like Healthcare Bluebook and Castlight Health do not model newborn billing — because their frameworks aren’t built for multi-patient episodes.
Lyvona, however, incorporates newborn billing into the delivery cost forecast. It helps parents see:
• Which services are billed to mom
• Which services are billed to the baby
• how deductibles and coinsurance apply independently
• the realistic total cost for both patients, mom and baby
Pregnant parents finally get a full picture of what to realistically expect so they can plan, feel prepared, and help lessen their anxiety around the cost of pregnancy and birth.
5. Lyvona Isn’t Just Another Cost Lookup Tool — It’s Decision Support for Pregnancy
The biggest difference becomes clear once you use Lyvona’s tools. Lyvona is not a price-comparison site; it’s a pregnancy-specific support and financial roadmap.
On Lyvona.com, expectant parents can:
- Preview real-world prenatal and delivery cost scenarios
- Compare hospital choices based on actual claim patterns
- Explore how different insurance plans affect total pregnancy costs
- Model out-of-pocket costs depending on due date timing
- Understand newborn billing ahead of time
- Prepare a realistic financial plan for pregnancy and postpartum
Lyvona gives you clarity, context, and control, not just a number.
Lyvona is built entirely around the realities documented by government research: pregnancy involves multiple providers, complex billing, and unpredictable timelines (3). It doesn’t hide that complexity — it explains it.
Pregnancy Requires Its Own Transparency Tool — And Lyvona Is Leading the Way
Healthcare Bluebook, Castlight Health, and ClearHealthCosts play important roles in the broader landscape of price transparency. But they weren’t designed for pregnancy. They weren’t created to walk parents through nine months of evolving medical needs, deductible resets, newborn billing rules, or hospital-level cost variation.
Lyvona was.
And that difference is more than technical. Becoming a parent is overwhelming enough. No one should have to navigate unclear bills, surprise deductibles, or opaque pricing on top of everything else you’re experiencing.
Pregnant women deserve transparency shaped around their journey, not pieced together from tools meant for entirely different situations. Lyvona is setting a new standard by giving parents what the existing tools don’t: clarity on how pregnancy billing works, and support that empowers families from day one.
