The Cost of Universal healthcare... it's not what you think.

I'm not a math whiz. Not be a long shot.... feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

Universal healthcare. $3.2 trillion a year. Big ass scary sounding number. Even scarier when they call it $32 Trillion over 10 years.

A trillion has 12 zeroes, so...written out as a big scary number $3.2 Trillion is $3,200,000,000,000

Mind officially boggled.

Okay... pack it in... that's a shit ton of money, no frickin' way we can afford that kind of cash grab.

You know what, just for shits and giggles, lets run some numbers. Big numbers... Im'a use a calculator.

There are approximately 170 million taxpayers... but about 76 million of them wont pay any federal income tax so that leaves about 94 million actually paying taxes.

That looks like this $94,000,000.

Should be a simple matter of dividing $3.2 Trillion by $94 million... but you know what, I feel like adding another .1 trillion, just in case... and I'll subtract 4 million, once again... just in case.

So $3,300,000,000,000/90,000,000 = $36.6K

Jebus! Holy shit, they are right. That is a literal shit ton of money. DAMN! I do hate when conservatives are right. I gotta be missing something here...

Hmmm, my employer paid $24K in premiums for me and my family last year. (I had a great employer by the way, almost no one pays for the employee and the family.) I paid an additional $8k in prescriptions, co-pays and things that were not covered (but I'd assume most have a forth of that), then I also paid about $1500 into Medicare.

Nope... anyway I look at it this shit is more expensive. It would be nice to cover everyone and all but I'll be in the hole about $8k-$10k more. That would seriously suck ass (actually I wouldn't care if I paid more and it covered everyone - righteous indignation and cussing is for illustrative purposes only).

If only we had a progressive tax system in this country.

Wait... we do have a progressive tax system. Awesome, almost forgot.

Okay... so this is going to be hard to explain. The top 10% of earners pay 71% of the taxes collected in this country. This does not mean that that pay 71% income tax, it means they make so much money that even paying a lower tax rate then the rest of us they account for a bigger share of the revenue collected. So don't stress about their burden. They can afford it, I promise.

It would be pretty safe to assume like most of our taxes this would be a progressive tax. It would actually cost most of us a lot less. Even if the middle class portion was 30% of that cost we'd all be seeing savings and everyone would be covered. 

Think about what that means. Right now people without insurance can't afford to get preventative treatment. Some will wait until a problem can't be ignored anymore. Then the go to an emergency room for care. Something that could have been treated or prevented now costs thousands of dollars. That money will never be paid back and that cost gets spread out to the rest of us.

By the way, in 2016 we spent $3.4 Trillion on medical expenses in this country. It was slated to increase in both 2017 and 2018, but I can't find newer figures. If the conservative's number of $3.2 trillion a year hold true that's a saving of $2 trillion per decade. Just sayin'.

We are paying more and getting less right now. It's time for a change.