Cancer elevates cost dramatically. I had cancer at age 41; I kept track of the full costs (not what my insurance negotiated downward) but stopped after my surgery, chemo and radiation treatment passed the $500k mark. I still go in for tests on an annual basis, so my guesstimate is that my total cost just for my cancer has probably surpassed $1 million. Even if that got negotiated down to $100K, that's still a lot. All it takes is one life threatening event, or a chronic condition to skew things out of what we would normally think is "normal" and rational in expenditures.

P.S. Thanks to my excellent doctors, Nathan Green and Richard Pitsch...