Those Sky-High Health Costs

Feverishly rising medical bills spread the inflation disease to everyone

In January of 1979, as the century's worst blizzard howled outside, George and Jeanine Loulousis of Mokena, Ill., hovered anxiously over the bed of their three-month-old son Jonathan, watching his sudden and unexplained fever rise steadily higher. Three years later, Jonathan was dead of a rare and incurable form of colitis, leaving his emotionally shattered parents to face an equally catastrophic economic woe: a staggering $400,000 in medical bills incurred in the futile fight to save their son.

From big metropolitan medical centers to...