Sleepless in Midland

A trillion here, a trillion there ...

"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money." That's the famous quote attributed to Everett Dirksen. Now days a billion seems insignificant compared to the trillions of dollars each of the new government proposals are projected to cost.

A friend told me about a recent article describing how Republican pollsters were trying to get people to focus on how much the Obama programs would cost. According to the article, GOP pollsters would ask people to "think of a dollar as one second - one dollar, one brief tick of your watch. A million seconds, the pollster explained, equals eleven days. A billion seconds equals 31 years. And a trillion seconds equals 310 centuries." They must have done some rounding, and math checkers might come up with a few more centuries, but that certainly is a big chunk of time no matter how you add it up.

The number "trillion" really is a big one, and most of us don't encounter it in our daily lives, except when we try to comprehend the government. So let's do the math.

1,000 = one thousand
1,000,000 = one million
1,000,000,000 = one billion, and
1,000,000,000,000 = one trillion.

A trillion is a "one" followed by 12 zeros and four commas. For a visualization of a guy standing next to a trillion dollars in 100 bills check out this image. It's like a "Where's Waldo" with a tiny little Waldo.

Interestingly, the number of votes cast in the 2008 presidential election, 131,257,328, is remarkably close to the total number of taxpayers, 135,719,160 (2006 number). Let's divide the trillion dollars among the taxpayers, and each gets $7,368.16. (It was divided equally so as to satisfy Mr. Obama's share-the-wealth needs even though the burden wasn't shared equally.)

WolframAlpha tells us there are 6.57 billion people on the planet (as of 7/2/09). So each of them could get $152.21.

Breitbart tells us that China is holding $700 billion in U.S. bonds, so we could pay that off and still have $300 billion left over to give each U.S. resident almost a thousand dollars! Or Congress could squander the remainder on pet projects.

If there are any trillionaires out there Forbes doesn't report them. So maybe we should create one. Devise a computer program whereby one form 1040 is selected at random from all the IRS forms filed in 2008, and that person gets the trillion dollars and become the richest person on the planet.

And what if Barack Obama happened to be that winner? We all know he would be so altruistic that he would plow it into a healthcare program for the uninsured. Ya think? George Bush would probably buy land. Bill Clinton or Mark Sanford could afford to make a million indecent proposals to some lucky lady.

In any event, a trillion dollars is one heck of a lot of money. And it's depressing to contemplate the fact that voters are so acquiescent. At least we now know what "hope" and "change" meant.

How bad could the Canadian healthcare system really be?

The health care issue in the U.S. certainly has blood pressures rising. However, regardless of the side one takes, most will agree that there are some aspects of the distribution system that could be better.

One doesn't need to look far for complaints about the long waits for medical attention in Canada, the one problem that seems to get the most play in the debate whenever a comparison is made with the Canadian system.

That's nothing new to those of us living out in the U.S. boonies. Long waits for a doctor's appointment are routine. And once in the front door, there is usually another long wait to actually see a doc. Maybe a Canadian style system in the U.S. would mean even longer waits. But let's see what a Canadian has to say about it.

DenverPost.com has an article titled Debunking Canadian Health Care Myths by Rhonda Hackett in which she attempted to bust some myths about the Canadian health care system. This excerpt addresses the long waits:

Myth: There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care. There are no waits for urgent or primary care in Canada. There are reasonable waits for most specialists' care, and much longer waits for elective surgery. Yes, there are those instances where a patient can wait up to a month for radiation therapy for breast cancer or prostate cancer, for example. However, the wait has nothing to do with money per se, but everything to do with the lack of radiation therapists. Despite such waits, however, it is noteworthy that Canada boasts lower incident and mortality rates than the U.S. for all cancers combined, according to the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group and the Canadian Cancer Society. Moreover, fewer Canadians (11.3 percent) than Americans (14.4 percent) admit unmet health care needs.

President Obama has bitten off a big chunk to chew on, and he hasn't so far provided much reason to place any great confidence in his ability to solve problems. But maybe somehow, someway he will get lucky and a better health care distribution system might result from all of this. In the meantime those of us in flyover country will be patiently enduring the long wait under the present system for our doctors' appointments.

For an argument in favor of the status quo see 10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care.