A classmate steered me to PageTutor, a website for website developers. It happens to have a great illustration that helps comprehend the enormous amounts of money people are talking about these days in bailouts. And healthcare.
Here's a million bucks' worth of $100 bills. (That's 100 packets of 100 bills; each packet is 1/2" thick.)
Here's 100 times as much - a million hundred-dollar bills, $100 million:
Ten of those - a billion:
And a thousand of those - a trillion. Check out the little dude, who's now in the bottom left corner:
And, ladies and gents, the US healthcare spend for 2008 was estimated to be 2.4 times that much. And growing.
This helps understand what I was talking about when I wrote A Thousand Points of Pain, about how much money is at stake in this industry. The problem is that when we try to trim costs, there's going to be a LOT of money at stake. A lot. And right wrong or otherwise, when we try to cut something out, somebody's going to hurt. And there will be resistance.
So as I said in that post, I'm not waiting for the system to reform itself: I think we need to get busy at building our own solutions. The system may well improve, which is fine, but I ain't waitin' for it.
(btw, that's a big part of why I decided to go ahead with Google Health and HealthVault, as I wrote last month. That has turned out to be a bumpy road... I'll be writing about that soon.)
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Comprehending the US healthcare budget
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I can give you another way to get an idea how big a billion is. Last year I rode a bicycle across the country, about 3000 miles in 4 weeks. Every time I rode 3 miles I had completed another 1/1000 of the trip. There are about 16,000 feet in 3 miles, so every 16 feet represented 1/1000000, (1 millionth) of the trip. There are 192 inches in 16 feet so every fifth of an inch I rode was 1/1000000000 (1 billionth) of the trip.
ReplyDeleteOn a flat road on pedal stoke moves you about 25 feet or more that 1 millionth of the distance across the country.
Wow: I checked the math, and that's right. "Mind-boggling," Ginny says.
ReplyDelete1/5" is about 1/2cm, and that's a billionth of the US.
And a trillionth is a thousand times smaller than that. Well done.
With various health care reform bills floating around both the House and the Senate, President Barack Obama is pulling out all the stops to get the votes that the bill needs, which is good news for the public option. President Obama continues to rally behind health care reform. I am really concerned that the fiasco of this reform may make Obama a one-term president.
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