A few days ago I visited one of the strangest hotels in Beverly Hills. The rooms in this place overlook the Hollywood Hills and cost about $2,000 per night. There is a piano player in the lobby, the staff dress in one-piece green uniforms, and guests are offered their own personal manicurist and beautician. You can even select a “certified personal aide”, if you wish. There is, however, a catch: guests are required to be in excruciating pain before they check in, and they must spend the first few hours of their visit strapped to a bed, screaming.

Welcome to the Deluxe Maternity Suites at Cedars-Sinai hospital, Beverly Hills – a place where childbirth meets the leisure industry.

Of course, not all of the rooms at Cedars-Sinai cost $2,000 a night: some of them are covered by standard medical insurance – hence my wife will be delivering our first child there at the end of August. Still, with the hospital’s vast plate glass windows overlooking the palm trees of Beverly Boulevard and its roster of current and former patients – Frank Sinatra died there, Leonardo DiCaprio had knee surgery there and Julia Roberts gave birth there just last month – opting for the “basic childbirth package” hardly constitutes slumming.

In fact, as we strolled through the sunlit corridors during a maternity ward tour last week, I began to imagine myself trapped within the pages of Brave New World. At one point an African-American nurse, dressed head to toe in green scrubs, emerged from a delivery room and began to dance around a mop and bucket. “Happy Maternity”, she sang, to the tune of Happy Holidays. Only an Englishman could find such an outburst of merriment troubling: sinister, almost. What the hell is wrong with this place? I kept asking myself.

The film-maker Michael Moore, who has just released a film about the failures of the US health service, entitled Sicko, would probably have shared my unease. He wants America to have a British-style NHS, not $2,000 a night maternity suites. After all, who wants the childbirth industry to become like the multibillion-dollar wedding industry, or even the funeral industry with its graveyard concierges, $10,000 caskets and multimedia headstones? Shouldn’t childbirth be one of the last great equalisers?

And yet, as strange as it may seem to tour a hospital as if it were a luxury apartment development – and our tour of Cedars-Sinai was essentially just that, a sales event, because you have a choice of where to spend your insurance money – doesn’t the patient benefit? Would a national bureaucracy, administered by the government that brought us the Iraq war, do any better? I fear not.

And yet, for everyone’s sake, something needs to be done to make things more equitable. In a functioning healthcare system, a $2,000 a night maternal suite is an amusing celebrity indulgence. In a system where millions are uninsured, it’s hard to appreciate the joke.

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