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Here’s an interesting healthcare tidbit.  AEI’s Andrew Biggs presents us with this chart showing increased costs of human healthcare compared to increased costs of veterinary healthcare:

The point here is supposed to be that even in an area of healthcare where there’s no insurance and we have to pay everything out of pocket, costs are still skyrocketing.  So maybe having “skin in the game” doesn’t really have much effect after all.

Which is interesting — except for one thing: it might not be true.  As John Schwenkler points out, a big part of the increase is accounted for by a large increases in the number of pets.  We aren’t necessarily spending a lot more per pet, we just have more pets.  In fact, he points to some market research that suggests cats have actually gotten cheaper over the years: we spent $85 per cat in 2001 but only $81 in 2007.  (Dogs, conversely have gotten a little more expensive, but only by 11%, not the 30-40% the chart suggests.)

So which data is correct?  Beats me.  But considering the high-pressure sales job vets have adopted in recent years, I have a hard time believing that cat expenditures have gone down.  After all, we didn’t use to get their teeth cleaned or spend a couple hundred bucks a year on fancy flea/heartworm/hookworm/etc. goop.  Now we do.  Caveat emptor.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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