LAUSR

reeclampsia is a common and severe pregnancy limited by potential inaccuracies in the coding of diagnoses. P complication and a leading cause of maternal and infant illness and death. The incidence of preeclampsia increased in the United States during the past 3 decades, and substantial evidence suggests that a history of preeclampsia is a significant risk factor for heart disease in the future years following pregnancy. In addition to adverse health consequences, preeclampsia is costly because of the medical services needed to treat pregnant and postpartum women and their infants, who are often born preterm. In this issue, Stevens et al documented the short-term medical costs associated with preeclampsia. The authors combined state hospital discharge data with birth certificate data, commercial insurance claims data, and nationally representative Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) data to derive nationally representative estimates of the additional cost of medical treatment for women with preeclampsia and their newborns vs women without preeclampsia. This aggregated incremental cost was found to be $2.18 billion to the US health care system, including $1.03 billion in maternal health care costs and $1.15 billion for infants born to mothers with preeclampsia (in 2012 US dollars), which is about one third of the total $6.4 billion short-term estimated health care costs for preeclampsia pregnancies. This study is the first to quantify the medical costs associated with preeclampsia in the United States up to 1-year postdelivery. Previous studies estimated only the cost of hypertension during pregnancy in a Medicaid population in a single state, the per-person cost associated with pregnancies complicated by hypertension, or the cost of prematurity, regardless of the cause. Administrative data, including both hospital discharge data and insurance claims data, have the advantage of including large numbers of observations and information on diagnoses, services received, and payments. However, because claims data are collected primarily for billing and reimbursement, they are