The wife was reading an article about the cost of inflation in specific areas. The article claimed an operation needing a stay of four days in the hospital and all the additional charges including an in home visit after departure from the hospital.

Total bill for all was 171.00. This was in 1953. The absolute certainty is with what I think the bill would be today has to be many magnatudes higher. A thirty fold increase would only make it less than 6,000.00. My understanding it is around 7 to 8k to deliver a baby today. At least that is the price in Canada if for some reason like being a foreign national you are not covered by the health care system.

Although medicine is much advanced today if it was say an appendix operation back then. The only differance I can think of is the hospital stay would be much less today on average. Also the operation may be done with even a much less invasive cut.

My guess wages have not risen that high by some margin even yet. So in general health care may have seriously outstripped the inflation index since 1953. Incidentally the operation was 17.00 and was included in the 171.00.

These costs almost seem insane today. I was not working in 1953 so I have no ideal what the wages were. I know the family home was purchased just before then for 6,000 dollars and today it would have a market value of around 500k. The interm 60 years have been very expensive inflationary wise ones in many important sectors.

A comparison today is our cable, phone and internet service cost more per month. I paid less than half this for our first homes mortgage payment amortized over ten years. When I was making around two hundred a week.

We Canadians did not have universal health care then. So if I remember it was payments of 60.00 every three months for hospitalization and about the same amount to cover doctors. There where no co pays either. This was for the wife and two kids and myself at the time. It also was 100 percent coverage for everything.

Probably it is the compounding effect of constant otherwise seemingly light inflationary rises in prices that fools us over time.

For this to have any meaning, it needs to be converted to 2014 money. Being this is Canada money, my posted inflation calculator won't work. CA has to have something similar somewhere.


A good chunk of that cost is to cover jackpot (malpractice) insurance.

There is a lot of less visible technology that allows for shorter stays and less invasive surgery. This comes at a cost not related to inflation.

Property does not always track inflation so that is a poor comparison.

This isn't a direct comparason since cable didn't exist / was rare in 53 and Al Gore had not yet inverted the internet. The cost of long distance phone calls has dropped dramatically however.

I'm thinking it was 100% of not a lot of medical technology so costs were lower allowing for everything to be covered. In the old days there was a lot of " we've done all we can" that limited costs because the tech just didn't exist. This also self limited future insurance claims.

Many of your points are very valid..

Doctors in Canada do not pay malpractice insurance since the universal health care system came. The individual province they practice in covers them. At no direct charge to them.

Doctors are tracked in this regard though. Probably claims for negligence if more than average for whatever specialty they are in. Their billing number or ability to charge the system is pulled.

My guess is then they might go to another country as full or partial direct billing to a patient has not been allowed in Canada.

You probably have an ideal of where they may land up with high malpractice rates basically working for the insurance industry. Or at least a lot of their income flowing in that direction.

I need a cat scan every six months to make sure the stainless steel mesh inside me has not moved. What surprised me is the hospital I use is 150 miles for all practical purposes from the American border. Normally the system has a few methods to make sure they have the right individual.

All of a sudden it seems security has been beefed up. This time there where very specific questions in only areas I would know the answers to. Normally there are just a few fairly common questions to identify a patient. Might have been a fluke but I wondered.

Some of the questions the last time went way beyond that. I have a suspicion that our pictures may become mandatory on the health services cards all too soon. For the first time in memory I saw in the news that two people where reciently billed for services they received. Neither was a Canadian or landed immigrant. One woman had married a Canadian. I do not know the story on the other one.

My guess is it has become too costly to provide non billed care for people that should not get it here has finally been recognized. I always had a suspicion perhaps some Americans close to the border might be getting their hands on Canadian health cards and coming over for treatment. Especially at the border towns. Was pretty easy to get a health card.

Kerry on our site has received medical care here when traveling as a tourist. I never thought to ask him if he was charged. Or his insurance company back home was billed. Or it was just free. His daughter is an American at a Canadian university and she is covered but has to pay a small monthly fee for it.