It was a couple of years ago, and so my memory is off, and I can't seem to find the exact article I read. It appears there was a study done in 1992 which had similar results (I wouldn't be surprised at either possibility: I misremembered it as the 1970s, or there was a different study done in the 1970s by Friedman, as the particulars I remember are a bit different, 1901-1970 instead of 1944-1989.)

Found this, which gives a figure of 10X for a "hospital bed" "In 1992, the Hoover Institution published an essay by Milton Friedman titled "Input and Output in Medical Care," http://mises.org/daily/3793

And also: "Some years ago, the Nobel-laureate economist Milton Friedman studied the history of healthcare supply in America. In a 1992 study published by the Hoover Institution, entitled "Input and Output in Health Care," Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned and for-profit in 1910. After 60 years of subsidies for government-run hospitals, the number had fallen to about 10 percent. It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over almost the entire hospital industry. That small portion of the industry that remains for-profit is regulated in an extraordinarily heavy way by federal, state and local governments so that many (perhaps most) of the decisions made by hospital administrators have to do with regulatory compliance as opposed to patient/customer service in pursuit of profit. It is profit, of course, that is necessary for private-sector hospitals to have the wherewithal to pay for healthcare.

Friedman's key conclusion was that, as with all governmental bureaucratic systems, government-owned or -controlled healthcare created a situation whereby increased "inputs," such as expenditures on equipment, infrastructure, and the salaries of medical professionals, actually led to decreased "outputs" in terms of the quantity of medical care. For example, while medical expenditures rose by 224 percent from 1965–1989, the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population fell by 44 percent and the number of beds occupied declined by 15 percent. Also during this time of almost complete governmental domination of the hospital industry (1944–1989), costs per patient-day rose almost 24-fold after inflation is taken into account." http://mises.org/daily/3586

The 24 fold figure above may well be where I got the "26 fold" claim I made. Since the government has been running a deficit for a long time, including the period of the study, taking inflation into account is appropriate. Inflation is what happens when the government spends more than it take in, it prints the extra money. The impact of inflation on an economy is the devaluation of the unit of currency, causing a rise in the prices of everything denominated in that currency, including health care.