'Cost of Living' considers the real price of the U.S. health care system
Emily Maloney's essay collection is an indictment of the exorbitant costs of staying alive in America, and the weight of being hounded by a debt that reduces your life to dollars and cents.
In her 2016 essay "Cost of Living" for the Virginia Quarterly Review — later anthologized in The Best American Essays — Emily Maloney unravels the juxtaposition of working to pay down her medical debt at a job where she assigns medical costs to treatments — costs that may, in turn, create the same kind of debt for others.
She writes of being 23 and working as an emergency room technician at a Chicagoland hospital, coding charts into bills, determining what to charge for the level of care each patient received: "Each level had its own exacting specifications, a way of making sense — at least financial sense — of the labyrinthine mess of billing."
But Maloney knew from her own experience that
