Healthcare
Hospital stays, insurance premiums, prescription drugs, and out-of-pocket costs. Healthcare spending has outpaced general inflation for decades, consuming an ever-larger share of household budgets and GDP alike.
Health Insurance Premiums
The average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance in the United States, tracked from 1999 to 2025. This is the combined cost — what your employer pays plus what gets yanked from your paycheck every two weeks. Back in 1999, a family plan ran about $5,800 a year. Today it's north of $26,000, which means health insurance alone eats up roughly a third of the median household's take-home pay. The rate of increase has slowed a bit since the double-digit spikes of the early 2000s, but premiums still outpace wage growth by a wide margin every single year.
Hospital Cost per Day
The average cost per inpatient day at a U.S. community hospital, from 1960 through 2025. In 1960, a hospital bed ran you about $32 a day — less than a decent hotel room. Fast forward to 2025 and that number has ballooned past $3,300. That's a 100x increase in 65 years. Even accounting for inflation, real costs have grown roughly tenfold. The numbers capture everything hospitals bill for — nursing, meals, room, basic supplies — but not physician fees or outpatient services, which are tracked separately.
Prescription Drug Costs
The average retail cost per prescription filled in the United States, tracked from 1970 to 2025. A single prescription cost about $3.50 in 1970 — roughly what you'd pay for a sandwich. By 2025, that average has climbed past $117. What makes this dataset especially interesting is the shape of the curve: drug prices exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s as blockbuster branded drugs dominated the market, then growth slowed dramatically when generics took over a larger share of prescriptions. The recent uptick since 2020, though, suggests that specialty drugs and biologics are pushing costs right back up.
Dental Care Costs
The Consumer Price Index for dental services in the United States, tracked from 1960 to 2025. Dental care is one of those healthcare costs that flies under the radar because most people pay for it out of pocket or through separate dental insurance that barely covers anything beyond cleanings. The CPI for dental services has climbed from 27.0 in 1960 to 448.0 in 2025 — a 16-fold increase that has consistently outpaced overall inflation. Routine procedures that cost a few dollars decades ago now run hundreds, and major work can easily top thousands.
Out-of-Pocket Health Spending
Per capita out-of-pocket healthcare spending in the United States, tracked from 1970 to 2025. This is the money that comes directly out of your wallet — copays, deductibles, coinsurance, and anything your insurance does not cover. Even though health insurance picks up a larger share of total costs than it did decades ago, out-of-pocket spending has still climbed relentlessly, from $148 per person in 1970 to roughly $1,460 in 2025. High-deductible plans have shifted more first-dollar costs onto patients, making this number feel bigger than ever.
Healthcare as % of GDP
National health expenditures as a share of gross domestic product in the United States, tracked from 1960 to 2025. In 1960, healthcare was 5% of the economy — a substantial but manageable slice. By 2025, it has swelled to roughly 18%, meaning nearly one out of every five dollars produced in the entire country flows through the healthcare system. No other developed nation comes close to spending this much of its GDP on health, yet American life expectancy and health outcomes rank below most peer countries.
Doctor Visit Costs
The average cost of a physician office visit in the United States, tracked from 1970 to 2025. A trip to the doctor used to be straightforward and cheap — $10 in 1970, which was manageable even without insurance. Today the average visit costs $295, and that is before any lab work, imaging, or procedures get added to the bill. The rise reflects not just inflation but a fundamental change in how medicine is practiced and billed, with more documentation, more defensive testing, and a billing system so complex that many doctors spend more time on paperwork than on patients.
Emergency Room Visit Costs
The average charge for an emergency room visit in the United States, tracked from 1990 to 2025. Emergency rooms are the most expensive front door in American healthcare, and millions of people walk through them every year — often because they have no better option. The average ER visit charge has exploded from $285 in 1990 to nearly $2,960 in 2025, a tenfold increase that reflects both the genuine complexity of emergency medicine and a billing system that seems designed to maximize revenue rather than transparency.