I've been organizing my thoughts and research on the healthcare issue and I think I've come up with some insight and perspective on this monstrous issue.
Of course we all know the basics of the issue, or at least think we do, but I believe the average American is having trouble getting perspective and a sense of proportion. That's what I'm shooting for here.
First a numerical starting point: Obama's health plan would cost, according to the higher estimates, about $140 billion per year. Ironically, that same number kept popping up elsewhere in my amateur research. For example, $140 billion is about what we were/are spending on the war in Iraq each year. Gee, if we had had different priorities . . . but no, let's move on.
The main number I've been trying to get a handle on (and I had a little help from a statistician friend) is the number of Americans who die each day because they lack health insurance. I wanted to arrive at a figure that represented basically healthy though uninsured Americans, people with a more or less nomal life expectancy, who got sick and died due to our inadequate health system. I intentionally sought to exclude people over age 85 or less than one year old. I also tried to discount for incurable/untreatable diseases that wouldn't benefit much from even good health insurance.
I came up with 31 Americans a day. This is a deliberately very conservative estimate, a number that even the likes of Boehner or Beck or O'Reilly would have a lot of trouble arguing with; anyone could easily comb through the numbers and come up with as many as 42 Americans a day. And a very recent Harvard study suggests one might peg the estimate at well over 90 a day. But let's stay with 31 and allow me to explore what that can and should mean psychologically.
Imagine next weeks' headlines were to read like this:
Monday LONE AL-QAEDA GUNMAN KILLS 26 in N.Y. SUBWAY
Tuesday SUICIDE BOMBER KILLS 19 in MICHIGAN WAL-MART
Wednesday MIAMI ANTHRAX DEATH TOLL Now At 23
Thursday GRENADE ATTACK KILLS 29 in CHICAGO THEATER
FRIDAY AL-QAEDA CLAIMS CREDIT For DODGER STADIUM BLAST: 31 Dead
It doesn't take much imagination to predict that by Saturday Congress would be in emergency session, vowing to work 24/7 to get something done. Do you think they might allocate, oh, say $140 bllion to address the crisis? And what if some 'crazy' politician asked how we might pay for this, with some other wild-eyed politician saying "We'll put a $1 per gallon tax on gasoline! Anything to end this tragedy!"
Well, $1 a gallon sounds like a big sacrifice, but who's going to tell that to the families of those 128 victims from my list above? And what would you get for that buck a gallon? Well, by golly here's our old friend $140 billion again . . . same number that would allow everybody to have health insurance. So, an educated and/or moral American might take notice and conclude that it's all a matter of perspective and, ultimately, commitment. And did I mention morality?
Now, I'm n o t proposing a buck a gallon tax on gasoline, I'm just trying to show what's possible in a crisis and hopefully, what a crisis really is. Finding that $140 billion for Obama can be done in a lot of different ways, e.g., you can get $40 billion just by cutting Medicare fraud in half. I say again, h a l f . And I think there's at least $8 billion in taxes owed the government due to off-shore tax dodges -- maybe a lot more (I see a rather wild variety of numbers on this). Or how about a 0.25% stock transfer tax that would raise well over $40 billion per year? The AFL-CIO is pushing for this kind of tax, claiming that just 0.1% per transaction could raise over $50 billion per year. If the AFL-CIO figures are right, then the 0.25% rate would pay for national healthcare right there. Of course Wall Street would scream, but it wouldn't put anybody out of business, maybe just make a few brokers cut down to a one martini lunch. I think it's very telling that this hasn't, to my knowledge, been proposed in Congress; I fear that it isn't just Republicans that are controlled by big corporations. Hope I'm somehow wrong about that.
Well, it's getting pretty late here in L.A., so I guess that's enough for now.
Mike Stewart