Everyone pays
NOVEMBER 28, 2007 (WEDNESDAY) – I’ve been playing around with numbers in my mind this week, thinking about inflation and its impact upon families.
The inflation program I mentioned in yesterday’s blog gives us some insights into just how much medical costs have increased. I got to thinking about how much we paid the hospital in 1955 when Dan, our second oldest, was born in Fort Worth in a major hospital. The cost of normal delivery, with three days stay in the hospital was $200. Using the normal inflation calculator, the $200 would be $1450 today. The average cost today, however, is somewhere in the vicinity of $4000, I think. That’s an increase of 2000%. If everything we buy had increased by the same percentage, a loaf of bread would now cost $3.60, a gallon of milk, $19.40, a dozen eggs, $15.60.
Granted that medical procedures have changed in the last 52 years, and we are paying for equipment and methods unknown in 1955, isn’t it disconcerting that medical costs have gone up 20 times their 1955 value, and general costs have increased 7 times? If these figures are anywhere nearly accurate, they show that medical costs have increased at a rate three times that of other costs.
If you have more dependable, accurate information on this, please let me know. All these comparisons are my own, computed by the facts available to me. I think they are somewhere in the ball park.
Without making any judgments, I am only saying that young families, just starting out, with no reserves, are facing an economic situation far more challenging than their parents or grandparents faced. In the days of the Great Depression, income fell but so did prices. Today, income increases are definitely not keeping up with prices.
We need to pray for families caught in this upward spiral of costs. And that includes pretty much everyone. Those with healthy reserves pay higher prices, too, but they have assets on which they can rely. The poor, and the fading middle class, do not have that option.