America’s relationship with health care has been rocky lately. While politicians continuously fight over whether it should be a free, public right or remain privatized, millions of citizens struggle to pay their astronomical medical expenses every day.
But it wasn’t always this way. Using data aggregated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Public Library of Science, Mooseroots, a Graphiq site, found the average cost of a trip to the emergency room in every year since 1940. MooseRoots included both the historical (nominal) and inflation-adjusted estimates of this expense for each year.
