How Much Does Umbilical Cord Banking Cost?

Have you noticed that having a child has made you a better person? Couples who have children turn into a family and laugh more. They are healthier, more active, more willing to give up negative habits, learn to be unselfish and enjoy greater self-esteem.

What Benefits Does Your Child Bring You?

Your child is your gift of life to this world and could soon be a source of pride for you. But having a child also comes with responsibility. As you rose up on your journey to parenthood and growing older you are bound to have made plans to safeguard your life from the risks you will meet in the future.

Are We Doing Enough to Protect Our Children?

As parents in India, we continue to invest in insurance plans for educating our children, for covering emergencies to secure their health and happiness. One such investment is ensuring that your child stays healthy, even through debilitating medical conditions that may or may not be inherited, such as thalassemia, anaemia or leukemia.

Thalassemia is a blood disorder where the body is unable to make normal levels of hemoglobin. This reduces oxygen supply to different organs in the body and the blood must continuously be transfused with hemoglobin rich blood through professional treatment and guarding against blunt injury.

Every year, between 7,000 and 10,000 children in India fall victim to this disease. Regular treatment for this disease can cost anywhere between Rs. 12,00,000/- to 15,00,000/-.

Stem Cell Therapy and Umbilical Cord Blood Banking Costs

Stem cell therapy promises to cure this disorder by using stem cells from a healthy relative. But in order to be successfully transplanted into your suffering child, his/her body has to be able to accept those cells. This may or may not work even if you are the closest relative.

Stem Cell Therapy Works

On the other hand, if you have invested in umbilical cord blood banking cost from the day your child was born, then that very blood can regenerate healthy blood cells in your child through stem cell therapy. This is a technique that has been consistently proven to work positively. The government continues to promote public cord blood banking. Although there are no charges involved, the uses that this cord blood will be put to means you will never benefit from it as it is unlikely to be available when you need it.

Benefits of Private Cord Blood Banking

But should you opt to bear private umbilical cord blood banking costs, then you are ensuring that this blood is reserved exclusively for the use of the donor and their family. Not just your child but any other relative stands to benefit more from stored cord blood as this is the richest source of totipotent stem cells that can repair any tissue or organ in your body.

At the moment, the most Basic Umbilical Cord Blood Banking costs include the following charges, as a sample: Rs 5,300/- for enrolment and documentation, a one-time fee of Rs. 50,000/- and thereafter a monthly instalment of Rs 4,250/-. For 10 years, this comes to a total of about Rs 5,59,550/-. Compare this to the costs involved in treating thalassemia.

Weigh Your Decision

No doubt there are costs involved in the investment against risk. But the greater the risk, say, your family history of disease, such as diabetes, heart ailments, leukemia, etc, the greater would be your need to worry about it.

There are several new medical conditions that modern lifestyles can wreak upon future generations that may require the promise of stem cell therapy. Considering all the investments we make for our children, to ensure a bright future for them, should you not use your part of your income to make such a crucial health investment?