Charity supported health care. Sat, Sep 17. 2011
So there was a Republican debate a while back, and the suggestion was made that perhaps people who couldn't afford health care could go to 'charity'.
This is stupid for many reasons, but I made a comment else where that addressed the most obvious problem with that, and I think it bears posting here so I can find it.
First of all, how much money do we have?
ALL charitable giving in the US, added together, totals $300 billion a year. Let's pretend all charitable giving went towards those medical bills, every single dime of it.
We will ignore the fact that some of this already goes towards medical bills, and hence obviously cannot be redirected 'to pay medical bills'.
We will also handwave the fact that all other charities have no funding and have now shut down, some of which would have serious consequences on medical care in this country, like the Red Cross or the American Cancer Society. (Who needs those charity-operated blood drives? I'm sure the blood will just magically show up at hospitals.)
We will also pretend there is inexplicably no overhead in the charity system itself, that every dime in goes back out.
So we now have, in this hypothetical, all $300 billion dollars we can use to pay for medical bills.
Now, what do we need to pay for?
Well, 50% of the population is having trouble with their medical bills. But that's 'having problems', not 'can't afford any care'.
Some of those we'd be paying 100%, but most only 10%, so let's assume we'd average an amount equal to 20% of the population. (Or, in other words, we're paying 40% of the bill of every 'having trouble with their bills', which is half the population.) This is incredibly lowball, but let's just go with 20%.
Of course, the people can't get insurance and have trouble paying their bills probably have more than the average medical costs, but let's pretend that, hypothetically, they pay exactly average. Again, this is a super-lowball on top of a low-ball.
So we need enough money to cover the average medical expenses of 20% of the population.
And that comes to....
Dividing $300 billion by the population gives us $1000 each. If we're only covering one out of five people, we have $5000 per capita.
Average per capita spending on health care in the US in 2008? $8,327.
Conclusion
Crap, we're an entire 40% short of being able to cover people even under our utterly insane, impossibly-best-case scenario.
In the real world, having all charitable spending magically turn into health care is fairly absurd.
And the idea that there's only a 20% shortfall of money for medical care is even more absurd.
And under those absurdities, we still don't have enough money.
It's not rocket surgery, people. Per capita, there's $1000 donated to charity. Per capita, there's $8327 spent on health care. That's $300 billion vs. $2.5 trillion. If anyone can figure out how the first number is even slightly supposed to help cover the second, please get back to me.