After his sudden death 18 months ago, I took on the job of sorting through my father's effects, both personal and professional. Among them were 34 boxes of papers.
Nightly, I'd pick a box and go through it, often in tears, trying to decide what to save and what to toss.
One night, I found a small, faded stationary box among the stacks of neatly labeled file folders. Inside lay an old bill and a stack of faded "get well" and "congratulations" cards. The bill was from a Chicago-area hospital. My grandmother's name was handwritten in script at the top.
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Puzzled, I examined the itemized costs, and the date, and I realized it was for my mother's birth in 1925.
My grandparents didn't have health insurance back then to cover the almost $93 bill. My grandfather, an electrician at Consolidated Edison, paid it in cash. According to one relative-value commodity calculator I found, this comes out to $1,260.00 in 2014 dollars.
Come to think of it, there was no health insurance for my birth either. My dad, a doctoral student in economics, paid it out of pocket.
And there was no health insurance for the births of two of my three sons. Our first son, born in a small town, cost around $500 out of pocket, and our second son, born in a larger town, was "pay as you go" for an eternity.
For our third son, born in a large city in 1991, there was some insurance, but not much, as my husband's new employer's carrier counted the pregnancy as a pre-existing condition. We paid $4,000 out of pocket.
With that third son's birth, I was in and out of the hospital in 12 hours. My mother, a nurse, was horrified. She had stayed a week in the hospital after having me. And her mother had stayed in the Chicago hospital for 11 days after the uneventful birth of my mom.
Now, as my daughter-in-law enters the last week of her pregnancy, we hope this little boy will have an uneventful entrance into the world. But his delivery will certainly cost more–even adjusting 1925 dollars to 2015 dollars–than the $93 a young Chicago couple paid to take home their little brown-eyed baby girl 90 years ago.
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