Healthcare Reform: A trillion dollars and counting?
With healthcare reform the top priority on President Obama's domestic agenda, members of Congress are working quickly behind the scenes to get legislation crafted by the end of the summer. As the details start to emerge about potential policy options, so are the details about the cost of reforming the nations' $2.4 trillion healthcare system. Late last week, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Charles Rangel, said that healthcare overhaul would cost the American public at least a $1 trillion over the next decade. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch estimates that healthcare reform will be north of $1.5 trillion over the next decade. So just how large is a trillion dollars?
To put it into perspective, a million seconds is about 11 days ago. A billion seconds is a little over 30 years ago. A trillion seconds is approximately 30,000 years B.C.
We want to know what you think. We all know that the system needs reform as 45 plus million people are uninsured and costs are spiraling out of control, but will the current reform proposals stop the current price inflation or just make the problem worse. Tell us what you think.
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Savana_G
Ensuring all the people across the country with affordable and easy access to healthcare should be the government's top priority. There's a lot of talk about health care reform, and the industry does need it, especially since so many people that are only after the most basic of care have to get emergency cash loans to cover something as simple as a simple antibiotics script, and a full third of the nation is without health insurance. The lead researcher for the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, Elliot Fisher, a practitioner for over 20 years, has pointed out that areas that spend more on health care interestingly spend more on unnecessary procedures, and have higher mortality rates. So why do we need payday cash advances for health care that is worse when more expensive?