Do the math. A dollar per person per day works out to roughly $1 trillion over ten years. I'm willing to pay that (and even more) to cover myself and my family.
The cost of the various Congressional bills has been estimated as being on the order of $1 trillion over 10 years. The Dems are scrambling to revise the proposed legislation to lower the number, and the Repubs are on the attack. Sen. DeMint (R-S.C.) even suggested that health care was Obama's Waterloo.
Granted, a trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money, even as we spend the same or more to occupy Iraq or to bail out failed banks and automakers. In the case of health care, we might really be talking about 2 or 3 trillion dollars when we consider the administrative waste of the insurance companies, the aging of the American population, and coverage for the currently uninsured.
But a trillion dollars isn't so much when spread across 300 million people for ten years. A dollar a day per person is $300M each day, $2.1B per week, $109B per year, which works out to $1.1 trillion for 10 years. Am I willing to spend that to assure health care for myself and my family? You bet! Am I willing to spend twice that amount if the total turns out to be $2 trillion? Probably, depending on how much of that ends up in the pockets of United Health Care, Aetna, and the like. (Single payer would be nice, but we're not going to get that in the US anytime soon.)
Am I willing to pay more so that some destitute or unemployed persons can have access to health care? Up to a point....
If everyone who makes more than the average per capita income has to pay $2/person/day, that gets us to $1 trillion. If we take the top 5% of earners (which might include me) and have them pay another $3/person/day, that's 15 million people paying $1000/year, which adds $150B to the total over 10 years.
In short, when you get down to the arithmetic, we are not really talking about big numbers at the individual level. Instead, we are talking about the politics of taxation and entitlement, with an occasional foray into health care access, delivery, and quality.
What will we, as a country, get for a trillion or three? I'll offer my ideas on that in my next posting. Please stay tuned....