A 66-year-old woman who was presumed dead woke up gasping for air in a body bag at an Iowa funeral home

A 66-year-old hospice patient received the rudest of awakenings when she came to gasping for air inside a body bag at a funeral home last month.

Glen Oaks Alzheimer's Special Care Center in Urbandale, Iowa now faces a $10,000 fine for prematurely pronouncing a very-much-alive resident dead.

An Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals incident report released this week accused the facility of failing to ensure residents received "dignified treatment and care at end of life" and fined the center the maximum amount allowed under state law.

After discovering the glaring error, employees at the funeral home called emergency services and the unnamed woman was taken to a hospital for further evaluation. Two days after her harrowing brush with death, the resident died for real, surrounded by her family members in hospice care, the report said.

The cost of living in the US skyrocketed in 2022 as surging inflation drove up prices for everything from gas to food to home prices.

Higher costs have encouraged many Americans to reconsider the way they live — and, crucially, where they live. An October report from real-estate brokerage Redfin suggests that higher mortgage rates and mounting economic woes are making expensive parts of the country "less attractive" to prospective buyers.

"Six percent mortgage rates are exacerbating already-high home prices and motivating home buyers — especially remote workers — to leave expensive areas for more affordable ones," Taylor Marr, deputy chief economist at Redfin, said in the report. "Persistent inflation and slumping stocks are also cutting into buyers' budgets, making relatively affordable areas even more attractive."

While things might not be as expensive next year, even President Joe Biden said earlier this month that it's "going to take time to get inflation back to normal levels." Moving for a lower cost of living, then, is a trend likely to carry over into 2023 as respected economists and executives brace for a recession.

But where should you move? Personal-finance company Kiplinger identified America's cheapest cities by calculating the living expenses — including prices for housing, groceries, transportation, healthcare, and miscellaneous goods and services — of 267 urban areas in the US that have a population of at least 50,000.

According to their methodology, America's cheapest city is Harlingen, Texas, a small city of less than 72,000 people at the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border.

Harlingen — which sits in the Rio Grande Valley beside sister city Brownsville and a stretch of sand full of beach resorts called South Padre Island — is also known for its Air Force base and a launch facility for Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX.

"The Rio Grande Valley in general is very affordable," Craig Grove, a broker and owner of the Brownsville brokerage GRT Realty, told Insider. "We've experienced a lot of job growth in the last couple of years because of SpaceX, and there's a new medical school."

Grove confirmed that the lower cost of living around Harlingen is attractive.

"People have been saying, 'I don't want to be in these big cities,'" he added. "It's gotten too unaffordable, so they moved to the Valley and that's made Harlingen more attractive. It is very old school in a nice way — people are very friendly, it still feels like a small town and the houses are affordable."

The other affordable cities on Kiplinger's list are largely in the South and the Midwest. Read on to see them all — and see if any might be right for you in 2023.

A nurse at Glen Oaks working the overnight shift on January 3, 2022, said the resident was slowly deteriorating over the course of the night, displaying diminished lung sounds, shallow breaths, and a decreasing pulse, according to incident documents.

Around 6:00 a.m. local time on the morning of Jan. 3, the nurse listened to the woman's chest and said she could not hear the resident breathing; she was also unable to detect a pulse, she told officials.

"She felt the resident had passed away and notified the nurse," the report said

The facility followed standard procedure and called the woman's family and obtained orders from a doctor to release the resident's body to a funeral home, the report said. A funeral director arrived to pick up the body approximately an hour and a half later and put the woman's body inside a cloth bag on a gurney and zipped it shut, according to the docs.