Brennan, the point about the depressed healthcare costs due to the NHS is a valid one. it only costs £2500-£5000 for someone to have a baby over here, with all the trimmings, and the whole tab is picked up by the taxpayer. In the US just the excess can be the lower figure, as I understand it. If you have UK health insurance with maternity benefits, say BUPA International, then they allow around £3000 for a normal vaginal delivery and you might pay a £100 excess. Again, it's on the low side because there isn't much point to going private for most people. In fact outside London there are practically no private maternity facilities, and in London those that exist are predominantly used by overseas patients who are not eligible for NHS treatment.
The other great thing is that you don't have any uncertainty about bills or coverage, and there are no days spent on the phone arguing with insurers, or difficult moments in hospital where you wonder if you can justify the expense of some test or other. Basically most of the time, despite a lot of our whinging about wards with four people in a bay and noise, etc, if you need something on the NHS someone will organise it for you. That includes some single rooms for women who have had difficult or distressing births, fairly acceptable food, surgery, tests, dressings, counselling and so on. When things get busy some of the touchy feel stuff starts to go out of the window, but the important stuff like maternal and infant mortality rates are really good, and that's the main thing. The other advantage is that thanks to NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) who analyse treatment success rates and so on, if someone if trying to flog you some healthcare thing or other than is not available on the NHS, you can usually be pretty sure the evidence base for it will be flaky, hence the need to pay for it yourself. All the established, reputable stuff is free and dished out pretty fairly, tbh. High level, experimental and advanced stuff is also available in teaching hospitals if you require something usual. I can't think of anything I have needed and couldn't get apart from I paid for a nuchal scan on a couple of occasions when I wasn't in a high enough risk group to really warrant it.
With regard to IVF, this is becoming increasingly common amongst older age groups and while I haven't needed it myself, friends have spent something like £6000 a cycle approx around here. Most people I know seem to manage to have a baby within about 3 cycles as the clinics are pretty clued up. So it's the price of a family estate car, or 18 months private nursery fees, and consequently within the grasp of the average middle class couple. Some treatment is available on the NHS but I am not sure exactly what.
Ultimately here in Blighty we think our system is really valuable and valued. It's not perfect, but we see the chaotic, patchy provision in the US, and how many people die through lack of insurance, or how a few medical bills wipe out the assets of several generations of a family at once, and it just baffles us completely. The amount you all spend on insurance compared to our relatively low tax take for this benefit seems bonkers as well - why pay about 3 or 4 times what you need to for something when you can get it cheaper? To us it looks lacking in thrift and also disrespectful of fellow citizens (Christopher Reeve's experiences after his accident only served to reinforce our views - he was very popular over here and we looked on in shock as he started to have financial difficulties due to being paraplegic).
That's the British position, anyway.