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Having a baby is expensive – nowhere more so than in the United States, where birth costs can run into the thousands of dollars. But nothing could prepare this particular dad for what he claims was the most unexpected of extra costs: holding his child. Yup: “skin-to-skin” – the act of holding your baby against your body after birth – is a chargeable part of the service, according to a photograph of a medical bill he posted on Reddit. The man added: “During the C-section the nurse asked my wife if she would like to do skin to skin after...

I received the bill for a single porcelain crown today. It was almost $900. That got me to thinking, what would it cost if you had to pay for all of your body parts one piece at a time? At today's prices, probably way more than a lot of us are worth. God sure was good to us. He gave most of us all the body parts we needed for free. Of course good ol' mom and dad helped! Just something to be thankful for and a break from thinking about all the trouble in the world today.

They were among the biggest cheerleaders for Obamacare: Now they are learning, the hard way, that the predictions of the law’s naysayers are largely coming true. For example, Obamacare’s enthusiasts mostly dismissed the warnings of analysts who predicted skyrocketing health care costs once the law went into effect. Flash forward. “Faculty leaders will push the Board of Trustees to add at least $1 million to the University’s budget to cover more employee health care costs after two years of skyrocketing out-of-pocket payments,” Mary Ellen McIntire reported in the GW Hatchet on May 12, 2014. “The Faculty Senate blasted administrators for...

It is not coincidence that these two unofficial taxes--healthcare and college tuition--are soaring in cost, outpacing all other household expenses. I have long argued that to make an apples-to-apples comparison of real tax rates in the U.S. and other equivalently developed advanced democracies, we have to include two enormous expenses that are funded by the central state in countries such as Denmark and France: healthcare and college tuition/fees. In The Real-World Middle Class Tax Rate: 75% (July 5, 2012), I estimated that healthcare insurance (if paid out of gross income, as we self-employed workers do) in the U.S. is roughly equivalent to...

Kim Little had not thought much about the tiny white spot on the side of her cheek until a physician’s assistant at her dermatologist’s office warned that it might be cancerous. He took a biopsy, returning 15 minutes later to confirm the diagnosis and schedule her for an outpatient procedure at the Arkansas Skin Cancer Center in Little Rock, 30 miles away. That was the prelude to a daylong medical odyssey several weeks later, through different private offices on the manicured campus at the Baptist Health Medical Center that involved a dermatologist, an anesthesiologist and an ophthalmologist who practices plastic...

VANCOUVER — Concerns about the financial burden on the family of freestyle skier Sarah Burke quickly dissipated Friday and talk turned to how best to honour the legacy of the halfpipe pioneer. Donations to a fund set up by her agent, Mike Spencer, had, by late afternoon, reached nearly $200,000, which was the “clarified” figure for the medical expenses incurred during the X Games star’s nine days of care at the University of Utah hospital. Burke, a 29-year-old resident of Squamish, B.C., passed away Thursday after sustaining irreversible brain damage as a result of a fall in training on a...

From the patients in my office we can learn why Medicare and Medicaid cannot control costs. Neither the President, the Congress, nor learned journals are telling these stories. A spry, cheerful patient told me that she had fainted under the hair dryer in her beauty salon. The rescue squad rushed her to the emergency room of the nearest hospital. On the way, she was alert and speaking clearly with no weakness of her arms or legs. She told the rescuers that this had happened once before a few years ago. All indications pointed to a simple fainting spell. Maybe she...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law will increase the nation's health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation. A report by economic experts at the Health and Human Services Department said the health care remake will achieve Obama's aim of expanding health insurance — adding 34 million Americans to the coverage rolls. But the analysis also found that the law falls short of the president's twin goal of controlling runaway costs, raising projected spending by about 1 percent over 10 years. That increase could...

Managing health care is a tougher job now than it was even 10 years ago. In addition to various health plan choices and a multitude of insurance offers available in the market place, employers and the medical community must also contend with new illnesses and communicable diseases that are getting more and more difficult to control and cure. As our population gets more diversified, Americans now are seeing health issues develop that we are finding more dangerous and more costly to manage.

We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is “too high” — either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being proposed is almost certain to increase the costs. There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like the pea in a carnival shell game. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor’s office and more in taxes — or more in insurance premiums, or more in...

Cathy Jamieson and her husband struggle to maintain health insurance coverage for workers at their small plastics molding plant in Chula Vista. Premiums at American Design have doubled over the past three years, annual deductibles have climbed to as much as $10,000 per family, and the company has turned to three different insurers to find affordable options for its 12 employees, Jamieson said. With the recession killing more than half of American Design's business, Jamieson worries that medical benefits might soon have to go. “I don't know where we're going to be next year,” she said. If Jamieson is confident...

Litigation: The Founding Fathers envisioned the states as laboratories for ideas and choices. If the administration needs a demonstration project for successful tort reform, it need look no further than Mississippi. When President Obama said during his health care speech to Congress that he would "look into" malpractice reform and support "demonstration projects" at the state level, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a Republican, responded: "If they want a demonstration project, come down to Mississippi. I'll show you a demonstration project." Mississippi enacted tort reform in 2004, including caps on medical malpractice awards. As a result, the number of medical...

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee wants levies on insurers to pay for Obamacare and fines for families who don't sign up. To keep Obamacare alive, Baucus has proposed a Rube Goldberg scheme of fees and fines on insurers and the uninsured designed to forcibly bring everyone into the loving and protective arms of the nanny state...

Reform: The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee wants levies on insurers to pay for ObamaCare and fines for families who don't sign up. We can cut costs and expand coverage without sacrificing freedom.To keep ObamaCare alive, Montana Democrat Max Baucus has proposed a Rube Goldberg scheme of fees and fines on insurers and the uninsured designed to forcibly bring everyone into the loving and protective arms of the nanny state. To help finance his Plan B, Baucus would impose annual fees of $6 billion on health insurers, $4 billion on medical-device makers, $2.3 billion on drug manufacturers and $750...

Rationing: In the recesses of the House health care "reform" bill is a provision for end-of-life counseling for seniors. Don't worry, granny, they're from the government and they're here to help.At a town hall meeting at AARP headquarters in Washington, D.C., President Obama was asked by a woman from North Carolina if it was true "that everyone that's Medicare age will be visited and told they have to decide how they wish to die." At first, the president joked that not enough government workers existed to ask the elderly how they wanted to die. The idea, he said, was to...

How could we end up with a $10 tomato? The prices of tomatoes, potatoes, breakfast cereal and other commodities are generally kept fairly low because consumers control what they buy. No matter what we do in our current system of shopping, we will not see a $10 tomato until Obamanomics causes hyperinflation and we begin using tomatoes as currency. However, there is one other way that we could see a $10 tomato. That is if we get government involved in the food industry. For starters, the government could start a grocery insurance system for retired people to ensure sure that...

Sunday, November 25, 2007 EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first day of a seven-day series about the cost of immigration. When doctors swear the Hippocratic oath, they pledge to do all in their power to help their patients. But medical care is extremely expensive today, and hospitals run on money, not ideals. Balancing the ideals with financial reality is an ongoing struggle for medical professionals, and the number of illegal immigrants seeking medical treatment they can't afford exemplifies the problem.

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers seek ways to care for millions of Californians without medical insurance, a study released Wednesday says policy changes will be difficult to implement because of differences in how residents use the health care system. The 183-page report by the Public Policy Institute of California also dispels some commonly held beliefs, finding that immigrants and their children generally don't seek care at hospitals and emergency rooms any more often than U.S.-born residents. "With the nation now approaching 12 million illegal immigrants, the issue of un- or underinsured Americans has reached critical proportions," said PPIC...

Despite exploding costs, most Americans got sizable life-extending bang for their medical bucks over recent decades, says one of the most sweeping studies ever of health care value. AMERICAN LIFE EXPECTANCY 1960 -- 69.9 1970 -- 70.8 1980 -- 73.9 1990 -- 75.4 2000 -- 76.9 Source: National Vital Statistics System That might come as a surprise to anyone who has ever shuddered over a medical bill, and the report itself raises doubts over how quickly costs have escalated. However, the study calculated that Americans of all ages spent an average of $19,900 on medical care for each extra year...

Tuition and fees at some New York City private high schools will cost more than $30,000 for the school year ... New York already boasts the highest private school tuitions in the country, but prices at some schools will now surpass even the cost of sending a child to Harvard... Riverdale Country School, located on a leafy oasis in the Bronx, will charge $31,200 for tuition, lunch, and books for grades six through 12. Bus service from Manhattan costs an additional couple of thousand dollars. Parents are looking to spend about $400,000 before their children even get to college. Undergraduate...