...uh, hat, yeah, that's right, this is OffTopic, not Flame. "Hat" it is.
As is often the case when people try to play games with statistics, adding in a few simple facts that were glossed over or omitted is all it takes to deflate the attempted con job. Fact is, per-capita health care expenditures in America are already around an average of $7,500/year, half your made-up figure; and because the fundamental problem is maldistribution of care, I can speculate (with more justification than you) that the health care people who get health care get, is already costing somewhere in the ballpark of your made-up number. At least I have a reason for coming up with that number.
So you wave around a big number like $4,500,000,000,000 with lots of zeros...are you hoping that innumeracy will prevent us from understanding the number, and failing to recognize that it's not all that much larger than the present number?
Zeroes don't scare me...though sometimes you worry me.
That's as far as I need to take it to illustrate that universal healthcare only works in tiny countries with populations that are only a fraction that of the USA.
So, having made up statistics, then engaged in elaborate and tenuous speculation about behavior and motivation, you conclude that America is too large to take care of the basic needs of its population. Well, then, either we figure out how to provide a civil society commensurate with our population, or we need to split the country into several more manageable nations. Citing sheer size as an insurmountable obstacle is a cop-out, and a failure of imagination. I think we can rise to the challenge, and what choice do we really have? I'm not ready to give up on America. I'm not a RightWing nattering nabob of negativity, in Spiro's classic illustration of your "mirror principle".
