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Fun With Relative Prices
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A little while back, a glance at The Atlantic archives demonstrated the plummeting cost of computer power since 1982. Now we've got Channing Frothingham's 1947 article "The Health of the Nation: A Plea for Public Medicine" where he points out that:
$4 billion in 1947 dollars is about $37.4 billion in 2007 dollars according to the inflation calculator. Present day US health care spending, meanwhile, runs to about $2,000 billion a year. Obviously, you're getting more advanced technology these days and people live longer, but actually not that much longer -- life expectancy in 1947 was 66.8 years -- since our lifestyles seem to have become less healthy in many ways.
The amount of money spent annually on medical care for individuals in the United States is estimated at about $4,000,000,000. Those who have studied the possibilities believe that this sum is sufficient to provide good individual care for all the people and to reimburse the physicians adequately.
$4 billion in 1947 dollars is about $37.4 billion in 2007 dollars according to the inflation calculator. Present day US health care spending, meanwhile, runs to about $2,000 billion a year. Obviously, you're getting more advanced technology these days and people live longer, but actually not that much longer -- life expectancy in 1947 was 66.8 years -- since our lifestyles seem to have become less healthy in many ways.
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