Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

One of the ideas I talk about every semester in my Introduction to Sociology classes is the declining birth rate in developed countries.  There are several factors that help explain the low birth rates, but one of them is the cost of children.  In agricultural communities, children can be a net positive for parents – they can be put to work on the ranch or farm to make the parents money.  But for most parents in developed countries, children simply cost money, lots of money.  I’ve seen various estimates, but most put the cost of raising a middle-class child to the age of 18 at around $250,000.  Because I consciously think about things like this, I will admit that it factored into our decision to only have 1 child; we can’t afford any more children.  So, I have a pretty good sense of how much Toren will cost us to raise.

But what I didn’t know is how much Toren would cost from conception to delivery.  I’ve spoken with several people who said that it was a $15.00 co-pay for their child.  Wow!  Lucky them!  Toren wasn’t nearly so cheap.  I tracked every single expense we had with Toren to get a sense of how much he actually cost to deliver.  Keep in mind, I have insurance through my work and I think it’s decent insurance – not the best, of course, but decent.  Here’s the rundown of expenses:

• amount billed by insurance – $26,798.17
• amount allowed by insurance – $19,565.21
  • insurance discount – 36.72%
• amount paid by insurance – $13,802.83
• amount we paid – $5,762.38

Now, keep in mind that both Debi and I have a debit card through our insurance plans that receives money every month to pay for medical expenses.  We used both of our cards to pay as much of the $5,762.38 that we could, but still ended up basically writing a check for about $2,000 when all was said and done.

If you want to see the actual expenses in spreadsheet form, you can download my spreadsheet here.

This illustrates some rather interesting points.  First, the fact that we have insurance means we only paid about 9% of the total amount billed us for the pregnancy and delivery.  There was a 36% discount off the top for having insurance, the insurance covered about 45% of the bill, our debit cards covered about 10%, leaving us with 9% to pay out-of-pocket.  If you didn’t have health insurance, rather than having to pay the $2,000 or so we did, we would have had to pay $26,800.  No wonder the single biggest cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical bills.  If you don’t have insurance I have no idea how you could afford to have a child.

The second point is – Wow!  It costs $27,000.00 to have a child?  The Obama Administration is currently trying to reign in the cost of healthcare in the US.  I’m certainly not lamenting the high quality of care we received – having a neonatologist on-hand when Toren was born very well may have saved his life.  And having an emergency C-section may very well have saved both his and Debi’s lives.  So, I’m not complaining.  But I wonder how much this would cost in other countries?

One of my former students sent Toren a very thoughtful gift – Capital: Volume I (1st US edition to boot).  Capital (or Das Kapital) is perhaps Karl Marx’s most famous work.  Thus, the gift is Toren’s first book by his namesake. Ever since the book arrived I’ve wanted to do a photoshoot with Toren and his book.  So, here we go:

The smile suggests he likes it...

But it clearly is tiring for him (as I'm sure plenty of current and former graduate students out there can relate).

I'm pretty sure he's struggling with the concept of "species being" here, which can confuse even the best of us...

In the end, it was just too much for him at 4 weeks...

(Props to Steve K. for a very thoughtful gift!  I figure it will be a very effective tool at putting him to sleep in the not too distant future, until he understands it…)

(Props to Mike N. for sending this!)

For all you fans of reducing government out there, maybe you should reconsider.  This NYTimes article gives a good illustration of situations when small government doesn’t make sense.  For years the government has allowed private companies to provide student loans at virtually no risk to the companies as the government insures the loans and provides the funding.  The companies just make money off that arrangement.  When the government makes the loans directly (even if it uses a private company to manage the loans), it saves billions.  In short, sub-contracting out to private companies services that government can provide directly only increases the cost.  It doesn’t decrease the cost, and here’s why: You introduce profit into the equation.

Do the math.  When the government runs the program, it looks like this:

cost of program = cost to provide the services

When government subcontracts programs, it looks like this:

cost of program = cost to provide the services + profit for corporation

In what situation can “profit for corporation” lead to lower costs of programs?  (It certainly hasn’t in healthcare; one of the primary reasons healthcare costs in the US keep going up is because insurance companies keep increasing their profits.  Take them out of the equation and healthcare costs will go down, not up.)

When I read that article this morning I remembered thinking about my father’s military experience. When he was in the military soldiers did the cooking and cleaning.  That was part of being a soldier.  Today, all of that is subcontracted out at ridiculous rates.  Soldiers don’t cook the food.  Why?  Can they not cook?  Of course they can.  The reason they don’t is because defense contractors see that as one more way to take money from taxpayers.  How could it possibly be less expensive to have soldiers cook their own food?

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a rant against soldiers having more leisure time.  It’s a rant about wasteful spending.  I’d love to pay less in taxes, just like everyone else.  But that means cutting out these ridiculous subcontractor scenarios where they simply add “profit for corporations” to the equation and then claim that it is cheaper for the American taxpayer because it “reduces government.”  That, of course, is crap!  It may mean bigger government to get rid of the subcontractors, but, ironically, bigger government sometimes means lower taxes.

Here’s a great NYTimes article this morning summarizing some recent genetic research on the origins of humans in Africa. We’ve known for quite some time that humans originated in Africa, but the current studies trace human ancestry to the southwest corner of Africa, something that had not been done before. That’s pretty cool. But even more cool – about 150 humans crossed into Arabia and their descendents settled the rest of the world. The fact that we can determine all of that through genetics is simply remarkable. Science rocks!