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Comment by twinkletwinkle | Hacker News Reader

The BLS calculator (https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm) says $400 in 2013 is ~ $430 today. Seems unlikely to account for that much of the change.

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Yeah that's not too big of a change. Medical expenses, at least measured by national health expenditure per capita, have grown about 17% since then [1]. An additional 17% on $400 would be ~ $468. That number could be enough to account for some of the difference. Of course, medical expenses are by no means the only type of emergency expense, and what you've said about inflation as a whole is still true.

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184955/us-national-healt...

Why does it seem unlikely? I don't know the shape of the distribution but it doesn't seem implausible to me that a 7.5% change in the threshold amount would correspond to a 10% change in the population quantile.

Govt inflation numbers represent a portfolio consisting of all commodities in equal quantity. But if you hold a portfolio of iPhones, Toyotas, and etc (assuming they are non depreciating assets) that number would double very easily.

Government inflation numbers don't work like that at all. They are based on the Consumer Price Index, which uses a market basket of consumer goods and services.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

"Average price data for select utility, automotive fuel, and food items are also available."

All of these are commodities. And every single product derived is based on commodity. Most commodities can be traded on commodity markets.

Yes, but all of them being commodities (what I said) is not the same as inflation only being accurate when someone purchases every commodity available in the marketplace (what you said).

Thats exactly how asset managers construct a portfolio thats suppose to track inflation.

Inflation of a portfolio of iPhones is completely different than inflation that an average American pays due to cost of living changes in the economy. You're cherrypicking a hypothetical scenario that doesn't apply at all to the example at hand, which is the average person's ability to pay for emergencies that arise related to living expenses.

All I am saying is that $400 in 2013 is not worth $430 today, Its wort a LOT MORE! Stop arguing like a idiot.

doesnt this look like the chart of CPI https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/DBC

https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

Which includes blackbox modifiers like "hedonic adjustments". So if it costs you $800 to get a cast for your broken leg today as opposed to $400 a few years ago, but they claim the quality of the cast is twice as good, then they say there was 0% inflation as you are getting the same "value" even though its costing you twice as much to fix the same problem.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm

According to that link you provided, hedonic adjustments don't apply to healthcare services.

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