OT: Jibjab, Politics, the Big Bang and more!

[LintMan]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
Why would I be appalled? My share of any such treatments would amount to tens of dollars at most over the course of a year.

The cost estimates I heard for providing healthcare for the 42 million uninsured people in the US are around $42 billion, which would work out to just over $140 per capita in the US (but there are a lot less taxpayers than people, so likely it'd be more than that per taxpayer). That would allocate just $1000 per uninsured person, which seems quite inadequate considering that standard health insurance here can cost $2000-$7000 (or quite a lot more!) for a person. I'm guessing that any plan that provides better than a bare minimum health care would also need to cost around the same amounts, so $80-300 billion is more likely the true cost for a good system. And of course this is not "universal health care" - it would provide zero benefit at all to anyone who already was paying for any level of coverage.

Is it worth it if it'll cost $300 billion? I'm not sure. My point is just that even just covering the uninsured and leaving everyone else to still pay as now will cost us a fair bit more than tens of dollars per year.