You might be surprised to learn how lucrative infant circumcision in America is for the doctors, hospitals, clinics, and vendors who take part. Believe it or not, there is big money to be made in the business of circumcision. When money is involved, it becomes more important to question the motives of the one who stands to profit. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” [Upton Sinclair]
I know better than to think a used car salesman is looking out for MY best interests instead of his own commission. Like a used car salesman, doctors will gloss over or completely ignore the facts that would turn you away from what they're selling. That's business.
Circumcision is a cash cow for doctors and hospitals. An OB might make a couple thousand dollars for every pregnant woman under their care, and that’s over the course of nine months. Circumcision takes about five minutes and you can charge over a grand each! I’ve searched high and low and found quite a range of prices for the surgery itself. The cost to have your son circumcised comes out to $704.83 on average. If a doctor circumcised just five boys each week at that rate, they can pull in $176,208.20 annually, and that is if they take two weeks vacation!
To put that in perspective, that is about 25 minutes of work per week (as opposed to the 2400 minutes per week the rest of us work), for which the doctor and/or hospital are paid over 4 times the national average wage index for 2009.
If you take that five minutes of work at $705 and extrapolate that into an hourly charge (5 goes into 60 twelve times), that’s $8,458 per hour. Per HOUR. Granted, this assumes 5 minutes per circumcision. We could expand it to 30 minutes per circumcision, which gives time for set up and clean up. That would turn this into a $1409.67 per hour charge.
Of course, we should take into account the fact that doctors and hospitals and clinics have expenses associated with performing circumcisions. The circumstraint immobilizer (essentially the board they strap your baby to) costs anywhere from $200 - $400 each. I’ve found one for quite a bargain. This one is $298.70, marked down from $343.50.
The seller brags, “In less than 30 seconds, a nurse can immobilize the struggling infant securely in the correct position with Circumstraint. The immobilizer works on a proven principle of positive 4-point restraint. Soft wide Velcro straps encircle the infant's elbows and knees, depriving him/her of leverage. The child is held safely and securely without danger of escape. Circumstraint's comfortable contoured shape positions the infant, hips elevated, perfectly presenting the genitalia. The platform between the infant's legs provides support for a circumcision clamp. Without pins, towels, plastic shells or the threat of strangulation, Circumstraint snugly and securely immobilizes the infant with their entire torso visible.”
Sounds great, right? And when the straps wear out from having restrained hundreds of thrashing newborns, eBay has replacements on sale for $23.95 plus shipping.
There are plenty of other tools these clinics and hospitals have to pay for. The Gomco clamp, a popular tool for circumcision, runs about $150 plus shipping (marked down from $210). Of course, you have to buy two different sized clamps if you intend to circumcise both newborns and older children.
The Mogen clamp is a little more high-end, coming in around $400 apiece. I can’t tell the difference between the Moore Medical Mogen Clamp and the Skylar Mogen Clamp except that the Skylar Mogen Circumcision Clamp is more expensive: $543.44. Thank goodness both of these clamps can be used multiples times - otherwise it might really cut into profits!
The PlastiBell circumcision device is single use, so doctors and hospitals buy these in packs of 25 for around $150 or in bulk (125 devices) for about $650 If you’re planning on performing at least 125 circumcisions with this device, you’ll save $100 by buying in bulk. It’s a deal you just can’t pass up!
But really, doctors recoup their costs pretty easily. One father complained that the triple antibiotic ointment the hospital used on his child, the same ointment you can get at any drugstore for $4.95, was listed on the itemized bill at $166. That’s a 3354% mark-up.
And if the mark-ups on supplies and services don’t satisfy, there’s always money to be made from the discarded foreskins. Wait, what’s that? They can SELL foreskin? You betcha.
There are actually two different markets (that I know of) for human foreskin. One is the cosmetics industry. You may have heard that Oprah Winfrey uses a face cream made with human foreskin. It’s a pretty lucrative business when you consider that a bottle of this face cream will sell for a hundred bucks.
The other market for foreskins is in the medical field. Did you know that you can buy a milliliter of frozen foreskin for $399.00 to $559.00? These fibroblasts have many applications. The website of ATCC (the biological resource center selling these fibroblasts) says they can be used in response to pathogens, skin aging, wound healing, gene delivery and skin diseases. One single foreskin can actually pull in $100,000 in total. Bet the owner of that foreskin won’t see a dime, poor kid. He could go to college a few times on that amount of money!
So the doctors, hospitals, clinics, and vendors are pulling in a pretty penny. And American parents? They’re paying someone anywhere from $300 to $3,000 to cut away a healthy body part from their newborn sons. They might pay hundreds or thousands more on follow-up “circumcision revision” surgeries. One way or another, the math isn’t adding up on their side.
How about instead, you take the $705 and put it in the stock market for your son. That way, if in 18 years he decides that his natural body is "icky," he can use that money to get circumcised. Or to buy a car. I bet he'll choose the car.
