Country & City Cost

Two aspects of what it costs to be sick in the country and in a great city appeared in surveys published last week. The city medical cost survey was of New York City's 6,000,000 people, made by the research bureau of the local Welfare Council. The country survey was of 860 farm families (3,990 individuals) living in every State of the Union and in every type of farming country. The Farmer's Wife, monthly magazine published at St. Paul, made this survey with the help of the National Committee on the Cost of Medical Care.*

The 860 farm families surveyed last year paid out an average of $104.94 each for doctors, nurses, hospital care, medicines, quackeries. With an average of 4.64 persons per family, the individual outlay was $22.62. New York City, as a community, last year spent 150 millions caring for the sick --on doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics, drugs, quackeries. That was a per capita cost of $25. The people also lost an estimated 75 millions by absence from work on account of illness. Some 2,400,000 visited the 675 municipal and private clinics.

* Under the chairmanship of Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior, it is making a five-year study of the cost of medical care.