You really want to give your beloved a valuable rock? Forget diamonds. Try a kidney stone. It won’t be quite as pretty. A calcium oxalate kidney stone, the most common, is a yucky brownish-black with a sort of pockmarked surface like a tiny moon or an ugly, magnified grain of sand.But it sure is expensive.
One kidney stone recently was sold for $4,351.15. And that was for a less- than-three-hour visit to the local hospital emergency room during which I received pain medication. An efficient and professional physician examination, a CT scan which confirmed the stone’s presence and two others waiting in the wings, one in each kidney, and an assortment of blood and urine lab tests .
The kidney stone is roughly 3 millimeters in diameter. A one-carat, round-shaped diamond is roughly 6.3 millimeters in diameter or more than twice as large. A medium-quality diamond of that size will actually cost about $4,200. That one-carat diamond, based on the “value” of a kidney stone less than half its size, would actually cost more than $9,100. At $400 an ounce, gold is a bargain compared to kidney stones and diamonds.
That’s a succinct way of saying that the health care industry, maybe even more than the defense industry, has an uncanny ability to adapt to any playing field to extract revenue from the pockets of Americans at almost unprecedented rates. In 1980, it was $1,067; in 1990, $2,738; and in 2000, $4,499, close to the cost of one kidney stone. That’s a percentage jump of 322 percent between 1980 and 2000. Now kidney stones cost twice as much as diamonds.
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