Birthing babies used to be very cheap, as you can see from old hospital bills.
It can be a pain to go through piles of old papers, but it can also be very interesting to learn about our parents’ lives. Old army papers, grocery lists, and scrapbooks can show us what life was like in the past.
A cool new social media trend has been going around, and it’s really cool. A lot of people have been posting old hospital bills from when their parents and grandparents were born. The prices are surprisingly low.
These days, giving birth can cost a lot of money. It can be hard or impossible to know how much a hospital bill will be ahead of time.
Some patients get surprised at every turn, and the bills can be thousands of dollars or more. In 2016, a couple in Utah was charged $40 just to be able to hold their new son after he was born through a c-section.
But if you go back in time, bills were easier to understand and hospital stays after giving birth cost a lot less. The bill below is from the 1950s and is for a stay of more than one day. Oxygen and an incubator were part of the $10.75 price after insurance fees. Today, $10.77 is equal to $101.96 when adjusted for inflation.
This bill from 1961 is for a C-section birth. It only cost the patient $80.75 to stay in the hospital for nine days, plus a $4.60 phone fee, so she must have asked for a room with a phone. It cost $418.85 all together before insurance. That amount of money today is $3,552.86. In 1961, the average price of a new car was $2,850.
This bill from 1947 shows that a 4-day stay cost $54.00. There was no mention of health insurance. In 2019, that rate of return would be $634.88. A brand-new Bulova watch for men in 1947 cost $52.50, which means the hospital bill was only a little more than that.
In 1968, a 5-day hospital stay costs $406.80, which is the same as $3,015.52 today. In 1968, a brand-new fridge would cost around $200.
In 1936, one of the comments on the picture below said that his grandparents had a bill for $36.00, which they paid 50¢ a week until it was paid off, which would be $659.42 today.
Based on a post on Reddit, a couple in North Dakota was charged $99.84 in 1954, with $2 listed for x-ray services. Taking inflation into account, that charge would be $938.18 today. At that time, a job in manufacturing would have paid at least $71.86 a week on average.
The hospital barber is one of the possible charges that were written down but not used!
Someone else on Reddit posted the bill from his dad’s birth in 1955. A stay in the hospital for five days cost $87.65, which is about $829.81 in today’s money. That year, the average rent was $87.00 a month.
One person who commented on this picture said that their wife’s recent seven-day hospital stay for giving birth cost a shocking $112,000.
If having a child cost as much as it does now, do you think those patients who were billed above would have been able to afford to have kids at all?