In Comparison

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Clay Johnston who made the following eye-opening claim:

"And let me give you one killer figure: We spend so much money on our health care in this country — or as I prefer to think of it, 'sick care' in this country — that for every dollar that the other 33 modern economies spend for universal coverage, we spend $2.64. And this is done using something called “purchasing parity dollars,” so they’re truly comparable. So we spend $2.64 per person and still have almost 50 million people with no coverage and 30 million with limited coverage, and these other countries spend far less with universal coverage.

Here’s how much that costs: In the year 2010, if we had had the French health care system, which is one of the most expensive in the world, it would have provided universal coverage and it also would have saved us so much money that we could have eliminated the individual income tax that year and all else would have been equal. Our excess health care costs above those of the French were a little over 6 percent of the economy and the income tax in 2010 brought in about 6 percent of the economy."

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I'd like to apologize to the creators of South Park for lifting the central image of today's 'toon from their latest episode, even though their version had employees of a local cable company similarly auto-frottaging their nipples instead of smug, self-satisfied tools of oligarchs.



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PS: So many people read and shared my last 'toon, about the difference between fundamentalism and secularism, that it broke my server's log files. So, thanks for sharing and caring! And feel free to break that lil' sumbitch whenever you want.

=Lefty=