Rusted Sky

You ever really look at the numbers on health care? Sure, there's the ancedotal - folks with no insurance losing everything when hit with massive medical bills... but realistically how many are affected like that? You don't get a sense of the numbers - instead, you get a sense of urgency to cover everyone without exception.

And it doesn't make sense.

Kudlow's Money Politic$ on National Review Online

It looks like President Obama’s big-bang health-care reform is going down to defeat. This is good. But my question is why do we need it at all? According to a recent ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That could mean up to 250 million people are happy. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?

There’s more. According the U.S. Census Bureau, we don’t have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured. When you take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who chose not to sign up, that removes roughly 20 million people. Then take out about 10 million more who are not U.S. citizens, and 11 million who are eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but have not signed up for some reason.

So that really leaves only 10 million to 15 million people who are truly long-term uninsured.

That works out to - if the upper bound of 15 million is met - about $106k over ten years to insure the people who are uninsured, unless I'm dropping a digit or two. Call it $10k/yr, just to round things neatly.

A quick search online gives rates running from about $200/month to $700 a month, depending on coverage. Or, less than $10k/year.

Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to just give those 15 million a health credit card? Or, if they're already using EFT for state benefits, to let them use their welfare card for medical also?

Hey, I like to spend money as well as the next guy (especially when faced with lots'o'stuff as at MicroCenter) but I do like to get decent value for the money... and let me tell ya, having the government handle things ain't the way to go...

So tell me again why we must create a massive new health bureaucracy?

J.