The bulk is spent on inpatient hospital stays I believe. People like to blame pharma, but hospitals charge absurd prices and many times just make people sicker.
Perfect time for me to vent on the topic. My experience confirms your claim.
My wife and baby stayed 3 days at the hospital after the c-section. Charge for room and board item on the bill is $30,000 for her and $50,000 for the baby. In total $80,000 for 3 days.
And it was shared room. There was another woman with her baby with them. That single hospital room's rate is $53,000 a day.
Wow. I am now imagining a black market where I invite pregnant mothers and families to come stay with me. I could literally house you and entertain you and provide all your needs for 2 months prior to birth at which point you would roll into any hospital and have the child. In Canada the estimated cost for a regular birth is $5000-$8000 or $10000-12000 for a c-section. THAT IS CANADIAN DOLLARS! You spent 80k usd. Again wow. If I only had half of what you paid I could offer a lavish stay with everything taken care of. Plus world class doctors. How come more people are not traveling to have babies? Baby number 2 in the works yet?;)
To be clear I (we) do have insurance so I'm not paying 80k out of my pocket. Just wanted to provide anecdotal evidence to the claim that hospital stay is outrageous.
And that was baby No.3 that part of my life is done :D
Forgive my ignorance, but does any of this have to do with insurance (I assume you're in the U.S.)? Those prices are absurd, so I'm wondering how is it possible for the average American household to afford to pay for that? I imagine one argument being "that's the thing, they can't afford it"; but.. isn't that what hundreds of thousands of Americans are doing per year?
I suspect it does, but who knows? That's part of the problem. Three people do the same thing at the same hospital, but since two of them have different insurance and one is just paying cash, they might get three very different prices on their bill.
No idea how insurance affects prices. But here's another anecdotal evidence: When we were poor (minimum wage level), my wife was on Medicaid or Medicare; think we did not pay anything for it. I'd remember having to pay anything over $1,000 back then. Don't have the receipt to actually say how much hospital charged and how much Medicare payed for it. In that case we'd have 2 points to compare.
My wife and baby stayed 3 days at the hospital after the c-section. Charge for room and board item on the bill is $30,000 for her and $50,000 for the baby. In total $80,000 for 3 days.
And it was shared room. There was another woman with her baby with them. That single hospital room's rate is $53,000 a day.
All other charges are 10% of room and board.