In a Country that is This Filthy Rich ............

Lately I've been speaking in my best Louis Black style, but right now I'm feeling more Ronald Reaganish.  Well......here you go again.  Health care.  Forget about the Medicaid issue for right now, I'm just going to address pre-existing conditions, of which there are tons of ailments that would fall under that classification.  I'm just going to deal with three, and all of them will be medical issues that the patient is not responsible for its onset. Type one diabetes (known as juvenile diabetes due to its onset in childhood), autism and cancer (with lung cancer broken out because of the possibility that most cases are due to smoking cigarettes).

The bill passed by the House last week does not require health insurers to cover pre-existing conditions.  Rather, it sets aside $8 billion over the course of five years to be allocated to all fifty states.  This amounts to $1.6 billion per year and when equally divided between the 50 states comes to $32 million per year per state.  I don't have the exact number on this, but that seems like the amount of money that trump has spent already, flying back and forth to his Florida resort on weekends thus far (I think the dollar amount per trip is $6 million).  This is a load of horse-E-shit.

Let's start with type one diabetes (T1D).  Here are some statistics I found on a juvenile diabetes philanthropic site

• 1.25M Americans are living with T1D including about 200,000 youth (less than 20 years old) and over a million adults (20 years old and older)
• 40,000 people are diagnosed each year in the U.S.
• 5 million people in the U.S. are expected to have T1D by 2050, including nearly 600,000 youth.
• Between 2001 and 2009 there was a 21% increase in the prevalence of T1D in people under age 20.
• $14B T1D-associated annual healthcare costs in the U.S.

Let's assume that only 5% of the patients with this ailment are without insurance.   That represents $700 million.

Next, I'll tackle autism.  In 2010 and 2012, the incidence of autism was 14.6 per 1,000 children.  In 2012 there were 3,952,937 births per the Center for Disease Control (CDC).  This means there were 3,953 groups of 1,000.  Then I multiply 3,953 by 14.6 I come up with 57,713 new cases per year. Researchers found that kids with autism had medical bills that were an average of $3,000 more per year than "normal" Children.  This amounts to $173,139,000 per year.  Applying the same 5 percent uninsured  assumption (which I think is mighty conservative on my part) that equals $8,656,950 per year.

Lastly let's add Cancer into the equation with lung cancer removed. In 2016 lung cancer represented 13% of all cancers. In 2016 1,685,210 new cancer cases were diagnosed. Removing the 13% leaves 1,466,132 new cases. Referencing the bar graph below and using 2010's numbers, $1 million multiplied by 122,000 equals $122 billion. Five percent of this number is $6.1 billion.

Adding up all the results gives us an uninsured total for these three diseases, alone, of $6.808 billion. Again, the amount in the pool for the whole country per year is $1.6 billion.  I've said it before but this time I'll say it a little differently.  In a country that is this filthy rich, there is zero excuse, none what so ever, why anyone should have to bankrupt themselves to live!




https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts-statistics/all-cancer-facts-figures/cancer-facts-figures-2016.html

http://www.jdrf.org/about/fact-sheets/type-1-diabetes-facts/

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html

https://consumer.healthday.com/cognitive-health-information-26/autism-news-51/autism-costs-average-17-000-yearly-for-each-child-study-finds-684667.html

https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts-statistics/all-cancer-facts-figures/cancer-facts-figures-2016.html

https://costprojections.cancer.gov/

http://www.lung.org/lung-health-and-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/lung-cancer/resource-library/lung-cancer-fact-sheet.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/