Obama predicts economic disaster in the near future.

Over the weekend in speeches to live crowds and on the web in his weekly address the administration used some statistics in order to advance their health care reform proposals that have devastating economic meaning.

a staggering new report from the Treasury Department indicating that under the status quo around half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next ten years.

Holy crap! Half of the work force is going to loose their jobs! OMFG! Sell your stock! Buy gold! Buy guns! Horde water and rations!

OK, calm down. Let's step back once again and crunch the numbers. Let's see. The estimated age distribution is...
(2009 est.)

• 0-14 years: 20.2% (male 31,639,127/female 30,305,704)
• 15-64 years: 67% (male 102,665,043/female 103,129,321)
• 65 years and over: 12.8% (male 16,901,232/female 22,571,696)

With the US population approximately at 300 million people, that means 200 million are between the ages of 15 and 65. So the president is predicting that 100 million people will lose their health care presumably by loosing their job. Wow! That cannot be a good economic environment.

But wait. He goes on to say that 'of those that loose their insurance, roughly one third will not have insurance for a year or more'. Oh? So those people who lost their jobs and insurance will find a job and get their insurance back from their new employer. How do we know they won't use COBRA to cover their coverage gap? Either way, they get their insurance back through employment and that's good. But that one third who go for more than a year? My God! What happens to them! Do they ever get their insurance back? Don't leave us hanging! I mean that one third turns out to be like.......33.5 million people! Wait? 33.5 million people? That is less than the 50 million who don't have coverage? and if you stagger out the 33.5 million over ten years then the number is roughly 3.3 million people per year who will loose their job for more than a year and become health care challenged, even with the availability of COBRA. So that means we are talking about 1% of the population.

We already crunched the numbers on the 50 million people reportedly without health care.

Obamacare: Crunching the Numbers

Much ado about very little

The upshot of that exercise saw that basically all of the proposed reforms would potentially help about 4% of the population. OK, let's go ahead and add in this new 1% that the administration has dug up with their doom and gloom predictions of the economy. 5%, let's stipulate that these reforms could potentially help 5% of the population. It still begs the question...... Is it worth letting the government take control of 20% of the U.S> GDP in order to help 5% of the population, when 90% of people with insurance are perfectly happy with their insurance?


If medicaid is so great, just put these 12 15 million people on medicaid and leave the rest of us alone!