half of 1.2 trillion is 600 billion. To run the “public campaign” it talked about for 10 years, that means $60 billion a year. And it includes:
– double cancer research – it only costs about $5 billion.
The NIH spending on cancer research has been $4.83 and $4.79 in 2005 and 2006, and will go down slightly to $4.75 in 2007.
(either researchers get no raises, or they fire some of them!) http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/NCI/research-funding
– “a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives”. Let’s assume 10M children, and it costs $200 each (money goes a long way in developing countries when it’s not used in war!), then that’s $2 billion. Let’s make it 2.5x to reach $5 billion.
– That leave $50 billion for “treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged”. Notice the key word “unmanaged” — likely those people who are not insured who are unfortunate to have diseases. I don’t have stats, but assume that on average treatment is $10K each to manage these conditions, you are talking about 5M people (US has about 45 million uninsured, so this works out to be that about 10% has heart and/or diabetes).
So if you keep doing it for 10 years; cancer research may yield cure to save millions of people’s lives; 10M children a year – that adds to be 100M children over a decade; and those 5M uninsured will for sure live better/longer and use emergency room less as their only healthcare… of course my numbers can be off, but whatever the real numbers work out to be, it’s still “an unprecedented public health campaign”.
So only if that 1.2 trillion is not spent someplace else! For the $1.2 trillion that’s spent (and will be spent), so far we had 3000+ US soldiers dead; tens of thousands maimed; and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded.
There seems to be an unwillingness to accept the article’s basic thesis – that $1.2 trillion can do an awful lot of good things to this country — so I suggest that you read the WSJ article about cognitive disonance – and read it carefully too!
