The Health Care Reform Math Game

Normally I don’t do political stuff on my blog, but I shut down my rants & raves blog because I’m too busy coding and this is too entertaining to keep to myself.

Let’s play the Health Care Reform Math Game! To be more specific let’s horribly simplify the economics of health care reform in a way that would shock the pants off your average economist, just to see where it leads. Hey if conservatives can simplify it to one number (“health care reform will cost us a trillion dollars and bankrupt the country, oh noes!”) then I am allowed to grossly simplify it to a series of averages and swags, fair enough? Let’s play!

So big bad Obama spent 1 trillion on health care. Pretty bad huh? He is evil and should be in jail or sent back to Kenya where he’s really from, etc. Well, it is spread out over 10 years, so let’s call it 100 billion per year. Of course, we don’t intend to pay that all at once — it would probably become part of the deficit but just for fun let’s say we need to pay it off and not hand this monster of unholy evil to our children who will suffer the folly of our communist dictator.

There are about 150 million working Americans, so on average each of us would have to cover a terrifying 666 dollars per year to make this reform happen. Ohh noes! 666! That proves Obama is the devil! No, wait — that’s just an average. The rich would pay more and the poor would pay less — phew, may have dodged a bullet there. So this horrible abomination shoved down our throats that no one wanted nightmare basically amounts to $55/month for each working American to guarantee better access to health care and reduce health care costs by making sure everyone pays into the kitty instead of taking a free ride on Johnny Taxpayer’s nickel.

Wait a second… $55/month doesn’t sound very, well, socialist. Want to know what my health insurance costs me per month? $1,200 per month for my family. Should I be worried about $55 more to guarantee that if someone ended up with cancer the insurer wouldn’t dump us out on the street? Well, it’s the principal of the matter really — Obama and Pelosi are definitely criminal, evil, lying, socialists who should be in prison because any amount of money taken from the American people without their consent is wrong, even if it is to help the very people who whine about it like kicked dogs.

And hey if my math is wrong, show me your math instead of name-calling and whining! Game on!

(Seriously, feel free to correct me, but you can’t argue with the basic point that minimizing a complex economic issue into a single number and hyperbolizing that it will bankrupt the country is just plain wrong.)

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