Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to "The Numbers"

My numbers
TB — (archived)

I don't know where $15,000 a year came from.

I have found it useful to use the average amount of money Canada actually spends per capita--around $4,400 a year--and multiply it by the population of the U.S. With the parity of the Canadian and U.S. dollar I don't have to do a lot of math any more. Canadian health care costs continue to rise steadily, even corrected for inflation. In constant dollars, costs there have tripled since 1975.

This gives me an annual government expense of about $1.32 trillion.

Note that a national health care program would certainly involve folding in current expenses paid on Medicare and Medicaid--about $600 billion--so the added expense per year would be $720 billion. In an earlier post on calculations I didn't make that correction.

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