A Little Perspective on Cost

As health care reform continues to bring out the worst in us, I thought I'd try to put the projected costs of Obama's plan into a little perspective.

According to a report from The Congressional Research Service, after the passage of the supplemental funding bill of 2008 on June 30, 2008, Congress had spent a total of $864 billion since 9/11/01 to fight the War on Terror (74% on Iraq alone and less than 1% on medical care for veteran). Once you include estimates for 2009 and 2010, the total spent rises to over $1 trillion in the last 9 years.

Or, to put it into more understandable terms:

As of February 2009, DOD’s average monthly obligations for contracts and pay were about $10.9 billion, including $8.4 billion for Iraq, and $2.6 billion for Afghanistan, a monthly average some $3 billion below last year.

If we accept that 9/11 was the root cause of this spending, then it is also fair to state that it was the murder of 2,974 people that gave Bush the "political capital" to initiate the massive government spending program known as the Global War on Terror. If you compare that to the 22,000 people that died last year due to lack of health insurance, over 7x the number of people that died on 9/11, the cognitive dissonance begins to set in.

With most estimates of the cost of Obama's health care plan ranging from $300 billion - $1 trillion over the next 10 years, how can ANYONE go on television and claim that the country can't afford to do it. Where were those same people claiming that we couldn't afford the Global War on Terror? My recollection may be a bit fuzzy, but I don't think ANYONE was claiming that we couldn't afford it. How are health care executives that make tens and hundreds of millions of dollars off of denying these now deceased people access to medical care any different than Al-Qaeda?

So, spending over a trillion dollars (over $10 billion a month) after the death of around 3000 people is a no brainer, but spending an equivalent amount to stop an ANNUAL death total of around 20,000 is considered political suicide? What happened to our government...

None of this even takes into account that the cost of health care causes an American to declare bankruptcy roughly every 30 seconds.

As a bit of a side note about George W Bush and "political capital," listen to this clip from 1999 where Bush claims that if he has the political capital, he WILL invade Iraq: