A Hospital Bill I Wouldn't Have Minded

My father-in-law found the hospital bill for his father's birth in 1927.  It's amazing that Grandpa Joe even has a bill for something he wasn't reponsible for paying, but that he still has it 85 years after it was paid.  But when I looked over the bill, I found two things even more amazing: a 17-day hospital stay and a final bill of $118.65 for those 17 days. 

With our high deductible health care plan, Chris and I paid at least $3,000-$4,000 for each of our kid's births and, as standard in this country, was allowed only four day's hospital stay for a c-section.  A vaginal birth would have given me only two days, whereas when my dad and uncle were born in the 1940s, my grandmother received ten-day hospital stays. 

I also wonder if this is the only bill the family received.  I received multiple bills.  One was from my OB, another from Soren's pediatrician.  Of course there was the hospital bill, but also seperate bills for care I assumed was part of my hospital stay.  It was when I received seperate bills for the anesthesiologist and the nurse anesthetist that I learned that not only were they not employed by the hospital, they weren't even employed by the same company.  When the bills finally stopped arriving, I did my best to try to understand what I had been charged, took their word for it on most of it, emptied our healthcare savings account, and moved on.