The New York Times is reporting on the uninsured. A lot of fluff, but buried within the article in paragraph five is this intriguing statistic.
The IOM, that's the same organization that Obama talks about when he says we are killing 100K people a year due to medical errors. So I can only believe that Obama believes their data in this case.
Let's look at the numbers. Let's round up for easy numbers. 20,000 deaths a year are attributed to lack of insurance. Obama is trying to brainwash the public into believing we need to spend one trillion dollars in public money over the next 10 years to cover everyone. Let us use easy math and assume a linear function over time. That means an additional 100 billion dollars a year are required to insure the entire nation.
And in the process we will save 20,000 lives a year. That's 100 billion dollars a year to save 20 thousand lives. That means Obama wants to spend 5 million dollars to save one life for one year. That's a Quality-adjusted Life Year of 5 million dollars.
The current standard acceptable range is about 50K dollars. That means the current government propaganda is suggesting an intervention with public tax dollars that is 100X greater than what current standards are considered acceptable.
By Obama's own standards then, one can only assume that the medical care we offer patients as physicians is vastly cheaper, to the tune of 100x than what he considers acceptable. If he is willing to spend 5 million dollars for one quality adjusted life year, he has no reason to complain about the excess cost of treatment going on in McAllen, Texas. And in fact, he would be forced to retract all his rhetoric up to this point and offer payment to physicians and hospitals 100X greater than is currently being spent.
If Obama is going to be intellectually honest with his American followers, he will have to find away to offer universal health care for 100 billion dollars over 10 years, not 1 trillion dollars. If he is going to stay within the 50K QALY benchmark, saving 20K lives a year at a cost of 1 trillion dollars is bad government, bad medicine and bad economics.
