Quote:
Originally Posted by Laz
I hope someone calculates the true cost of this program. The increased insurance premiums plus the subsidies plus the taxes. Then calculate the true benefit of people being insured. With high co-pays and huge deductibles the doctors or hospitals will still be stuck with a lot of noncollectable accounts.
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You mean like people calculates the true cost of say a war? Those same folks bitching about trying to insure Americans never said a peep about true war costs.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Three-Tril.../dp/B0052HKS0S
The true cost of the Iraq War is $3 trillion—and counting—rather than the $50 billion projected by the White House.
Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans—for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=96527
This is particularly puzzling when there are two peer-reviewed epidemiological
surveys
that give a far more comprehensive accounting of the war's human cost. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Survey published in the Lancet, and the Iraq Public Health Survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave figures of 655,000 and 400,000 excess deaths respectively. (Both were concluded in June 2006, a month before the violence peaked, suggesting the actual toll is even higher).
It is odder still that when epidemiological
surveys have come to be accepted as the standard method for estimating conflict fatalities - the method has been used without controversy in Congo, Bosnia and Darfur - an exception is made in the case of Iraq.
