The $70 childbirth bill

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FStop7

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http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/02/opinion/greene-birth-bill/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

(CNN) -- Seventy dollars.

Gary Bender had difficulty believing what was right before his eyes.
Bender, an accountant who lives in Irvine, California, was looking at a hospital bill he had found while going through the possessions of his late mother, Sylvia.

"I'm kind of the family historian," he told me. "I keep things."

What he was looking at was the bill for his own birth, in 1947.

The bill had been mailed to his parents after they, and he, had left Grant Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, in May of that year.

The grand total for his mother's six-day stay at Grant, for the use of the operating room, for his days in the nursery, for the various medicines and lab work -- for all aspects of his birth -- was $70.

"It made me think, 'How did we get from that, to where we are today?'" Bender said.
He was referring to the soaring costs of health care in the United States. For all the discussion of how out of hand the price of medical treatment has become, somehow that one old piece of paper put the subject in sharper focus for Bender than all the millions of words in news accounts analyzing the topic.

"It can't just be inflation, can it?" he asked.

No, it can't. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $70 in 1947 would be equivalent to $726 in 2012 dollars.


Does it cost $726 for a hospital stay to deliver a baby these days?

Dream on.

(article continues)
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NPR Planet Money did an episode about the history of health care in the United States tracking from the early 20th century to now. I'll see if I can dig it up.

Found it

Before the birth of modern medicine, hospitals were poorhouses where the indigent went to die. Then came the advent of effective medicines, especially antibiotics, along with a revolution in medical schools.

Suddenly, says economic historian Melissa Thomasson, "hospitals are marketing themselves as places to have babies." The professor at the Miami University in Ohio says that in the early part of the 20th century, hospitals were able to focus on happy outcomes.

Health care became much more effective, and much more expensive. Clean hospitals, educated doctors and real pharmacological research cost money. People proved willing to pay for care when they were really sick, but it wasn't yet common to go for checkups or survivable illnesses.

By the late 1920s, hospitals noticed most of their beds were going empty every night. They wanted to get people who weren't deathly ill to start coming in.

An official at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas noticed that Americans, on average, were spending more on cosmetics than on medical care. "We spend a dollar or so at a time for cosmetics and do not notice the high cost," he said. "The ribbon-counter clerk can pay 50 cents, 75 cents or $1 a month, yet it would take about 20 years to set aside [money for] a large hospital bill."

The Baylor hospital started looking for a way to get regular folks in Dallas to pay for health care the same way they paid for lipstick — a tiny bit each month. Hospital officials started small, offering a deal to a group of public school teachers in Dallas. They offered a plan for the teachers to pay 50 cents each month in exchange for Baylor picking up the tab on hospital visits.

When the Great Depression hit, almost every hospital in the country saw its patient load disappear. The Baylor idea became hugely popular. It eventually got a name: Blue Cross.

"When I actually started studying this stuff, I got interested because I wondered why we have an employer-based system," Thomasson says. "It comes right out of Blue Cross." The genius of that approach, she says, was marketing it to groups of workers.

The Modern System Is Born

Soon, Blue Cross coverage was available in almost every state, though not many people bought in. The modern system of getting benefits through a job required another catalyst: World War II. Thomasson says that if the Great Depression inadvertently inspired the spread of employer-based health insurance, World War II accidentally spread the idea everywhere.

"The war economy is an entirely different ballgame," Thomasson says. The government rationed goods even as factories ramped up production and needed to attract workers. Factory owners needed a way to lure employees. She explains that the owners turned to fringe benefits, offering more and more generous health plans.

The next big step in the evolution of health care was also an accident. In 1943, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that employer-based health care should be tax free. A second law, in 1954, made the tax advantages even more attractive.

Thomasson cites the huge impact of those measures on plan participation. "You start from 9 percent of the population in 1940 to 63 percent in 1953," she says. "Everybody starts getting in on it. It just grows by gangbusters. By the 1960s, 70 percent [of the population] is covered by some kind of private, voluntary health insurance plan."

Thus employer-based insurance, which started with Blue Cross selling coverage to Texas teachers and spread because of government price controls and tax breaks, became our system. By the mid-1960s, Thomasson says, Americans started to see that system — in which people with good jobs get health care through work and almost everyone else looks to government — as if it were the natural order of things.

But to Thomasson and other economic historians, there's nothing natural or inevitable about it. Instead, they see it as the profound result of historical accidents.

More, including the audio story, at the link.
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cost of equipment
cost of research and technology for equipment and medicine
cost of education for doctors and nurses
higher living standards

guess none of that is factored in inflation
not saying the current prices are low though, but you've got to be an idiot if you think 70$ should scale like that
 
Hieberrr said:
How much does it actually cost to deliver a baby?
Click to expand...

vw9Hd.jpg



http://transform.childbirthconnection.org/resources/datacenter/chargeschart/
 
Hieberrr said:
How much does it actually cost to deliver a baby?
Click to expand...


From the article

According to a 2011 report from the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the cost for a hospital stay, including physician fees, for a conventional birth with no complications was a little over $11,000 in 2008, the most recent year the report covered. For a birth involving a Caesarean section, the cost was around $19,000.
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Wasn't there a gaffer a few months ago who found his mother's childbirth bill and it was really cheap (like $50) or something like that?

I'll see if I can find it.
 
Wilsongt said:
$10,000+. The hospital charges the mother, then after the baby is born, they charge the baby, too.
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Oh wow.

As if you don't have enough to worry about that moment.

Born in debt. Fuck.

I don't know what the actual cost is to have a baby in a Canadian hospital, but I suspect it's in the vicinity of zero dollars.
 
grimshawish said:
Where on earth do you pay to have your baby delivered?
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the land of the free.

serious reply, I'm amazed that they charge the baby for being born. how is such a thing even possible? do they wait until the baby is all grown up before asking for the money? it's crazy.
 
grimshawish said:
Where on earth do you pay to have your baby delivered?
Click to expand...

In the USA? Everywhere.

Do you think it's free? Even if you yourself do not pay for it someone else does - the insurance companies, the taxpayers. We can debate all day and night about universal health care and health insurance but the bottom line is that the costs have to come down for any of it to work.
 
We need to lift the restrictions the government has placed on itself in regards to dealing with healthcare costs. There is no reason we should allow the rest of the world to get it cheap while we take it in the ass because we refuse to set limits. We are basically paying for the fact Europe and elsewhere plays hardball with the drug companies
 
Trick_GSF said:
You have to pay to give birth in the US?

Excuse my ignorance.
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Yes sir. You have to pay out of the butt hole. I'm glad my girlfriend's got health insurance through her mother (who works for a hospital) cause if she accidentally gets preggoes, I'm fuck-oh.
 
America, where you are born owing money. The symbolism is amusing.

Nice health care system you got there guys.
 
FStop7 said:
In the USA? Everywhere.

Do you think it's free?
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Its a hell of a lot cheaper everywhere else. We pay double as a percentage of GDP on health care than any other country, but americans still need to pay ridiculous out of pocket expenses for health care.

Most other countries, it is completely covered through taxes. I'd much prefer that system and I honestly can't fathom why anyone would prefer America's system
 
It's very expensive in America. It's 100% covered for those of us in the military, which was a very nice perk when we had our son.

Pretty absurd that you have to shell out so much money for childbirth. Given our trend towards inverse population growth, you would think the government would want to pay for it as an incentive.
 
Piecake said:
Its a hell of a lot cheaper everywhere else. We pay double as a percentage of GDP on health care than any other country, but americans still need to pay ridiculous out of pocket expenses for health care.

Most other countries, it is completely covered through taxes. I'd much prefer that system and I honestly can't fathom why anyone would prefer America's system
Click to expand...

I think we (the USA) should have universal health care, however until the issue of cost has to be dealt with first.
 
Add this onto the fact that you have to by law go to a hospital to give birth, makes this whole thing fucked.
 
Tragicomedy said:
It's very expensive in America. It's 100% covered for those of us in the military, which was a very nice perk when we had our son.

Pretty absurd that you have to shell out so much money for childbirth. Given our trend towards inverse population growth, you would think the government would want to pay for it as an incentive.
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Last I remember the USA was doing fine in terms of population growth, no need for incentives to have children.

edit: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-01-06-us-population_N.htm "Envied", even.
 
Anony said:
cost of equipment
cost of research and technology for equipment and medicine
cost of education for doctors and nurses
higher living standards

guess none of that is factored in inflation
not saying the current prices are low though, but you've got to be an idiot if you think 70$ should scale like that
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Inflation factores in the spending of the average american, so hospital bills are factored in inflation itself.

What goods and services does the CPI cover?
The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W) BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups. Major groups and examples of categories in each are as follows:

FOOD AND BEVERAGES (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, full service meals, snacks)
HOUSING (rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)
APPAREL (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)
TRANSPORTATION (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)
MEDICAL CARE (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)
RECREATION (televisions, toys, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions);
EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software and accessories);
OTHER GOODS AND SERVICES (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeral expenses).
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This just means that the cost of healthcare rose much higher than other goods and services.
 
FStop7 said:
I think we (the USA) should have universal health care, however until the issue of cost has to be dealt with first.
Click to expand...

can it be dealt it? the costs have spiralled in recent years, even implementing some form of universal healthcare will probably end up costing the same, if not more in terms of gdp spent on health.

as an outsider looking it, it looks like the various companies have had free reign for far too long, they won't go down or reduce costs without one hell of a fight and after obama, will there any president whose is willing to take up that fight?
 
FStop7 said:
I think we (the USA) should have universal health care, however until the issue of cost has to be dealt with first.
Click to expand...

Actually, you got the order wrong. No having a proper health care system is what causes the cost issue.

BTW, a proper health system is not Obamacare. Insurance based health should be an option, not the default. The default should be government provided healthcare.
 
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