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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

On topic and timely WSJ article on inflation: https://archive.is/AsvgT

It isn’t just stocks. Our inflation measures make a mockery of including households’ largest expense - housing.

Why does it make a mockery? It’s included in CPI and for a large swath of America housing isn’t growing by 10% each year, so we’d expect housing inflation to be moderate on average.

... and healthcare, which has been rising 13%-15% every year

Inflation numbers don’t include healthcare?!

Yes, they do. It's 8.833% of the index. Health insurance makes up 13% of that part, or about 1% of the overall CPI. So even a large increase in health care contributes only a tiny amount to inflation.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/medical-care.htm

Of course, these are averages. If something catastrophic happens to you, it can easily consume your entire budget.

They account for health insurance in a different way than you might think just looking at those 13% / 1% numbers might suggest. The short version is that if you pay $10000 in insurance premiums, but get $8000 of health care costs covered, they call that $2000 of insurance cost (since youd be paying the $8000 out of pocket otherwise). Of course, with the state of insurance in the US, its more complicated that that in reality.

I think the overall 8.8% figure is probably reasonably accurate for total health care costs, on average.

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