Today marks the beginning of the week-long healthcare hoopla, with ABC providing the all-Obama-all-the-time coverage on Wednesday night, a’ la a celebrity-saturated telethon, about the healthcare bill. While I can’t tell you what sort of fabulously-spun marketing spin will be put on the crap-pile of a plan, I can tell you that the numbers themselves will more than likely be glossed over. They’ll be glorified, for sure, and just fuzzy enough for a person who doesn’t deal with trillions on a daily basis to grasp – a person like me. And more than likely, you.
For someone like me – a self-professed math moron (or “moran,” as I’ve been called by one of our endearing leftist readers) – I want to see easy-to-understand numbers, in a simple format. I was an English undergraduate major, after all, so I look for the sifted down version of these types of data. This article I read this morning seemed to do just that, and it made me even more leery of the overhaul Obama intends to do to this country’s healthcare.
For those of you like me, I’m going to give you the bulleted list of what the numbers appear to be:
- Obama says that the plan would cost $1 trillion over 10 years
- It will only provide coverage for 16 million of the estimated 50 million Americans who are uninsured (huh – this alone makes me question why in the heck we’re doing a complete overhaul at a ridiculous expense)
- The Congressional Budget Office has ANOTHER estimate on what it will actually cost. They say it’ll be more along the lines of $1.6 trillion (Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) said it’s really going to be about $2 trillion when all is said and done.)
- Using the $1.6 trillion figure, it breaks down to $160 billion a year.
- $160 billion a year equates to $13.3B per month.
- $13.3B per month, if you’re insuring 16 million people, translates to roughly $833 per subscriber per month.
Yeah, that kinda sucks. A lot.
Using a Santa Monica male as an example in purchasing PRIVATE healthcare, “if the subscriber is healthy enough not to reach the deductible amount in a given year, his average variable cost ranges from zero to $292 per month, plus the $172 fixed cost, or a maximum total of $464. And since that is a health savings account policy, the $292 reduces his taxable income.”
I may have been an English major, but I still don’t get it. How in the hell is this plan better? How is it that I’m going to come out ahead when it costs WAAAAY more, doesn’t insure everyone, and we’re all going to eat it in raised taxes?
I don’t think it takes a PhD in Math to figure this one out…
