Medical Inflation: A Case Study

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Since it’s my birthday, it’s an excuse to provide a one-document explanation for why healthcare costs have skyrocketed so much in the past 50 years. Here it is:

That’s the bill for my delivery. I cost $133.98. Adjusted for ordinary CPI inflation, that comes to $1,000 in current dollars. Today, an uncomplicated birth (which mine was — I was born at 8:02 pm, ninety minutes after my mother was admitted to the hospital) will run you upwards of $10,000. Add even a little bit of complication and it can easily rise to $20-30,000.

Why? Because doctors were paid fairly ordinary middle-class salaries in the 50s and there was essentially no technology involved in any of this. My mother says that her room in the hospital basically had a bed and a telephone. In the delivery room there were no epidurals, no beeping machines, no phalanx of specialists. Just piped in music, which played “Yellow Rose of Texas” while I was popping out.

We can go back to that any time we like. But I doubt there are any takers.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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