Pounding The Podium

I think that if our  friends on the other side of the aisle were honest, they could easily understand what makes everyone on the right and middle so nervous about this health care bill.  To me a large part of it is the Voodoo Math.

As a young boy I struggled with math in school, and that was dealing with numbers that stayed relatively constant.  Even in algebra my teachers did not say “if x = y then, oh wait it’s z, if z = y, no forget about y I never said y, if z=q”  Just thinking about that makes my head hurt.  But if you have been following this health care debate, scary voodoo math is everywhere!

It started with the number of people without insurance was it 40 Million, 20 Million, 25 Million, 45 Million, 50 Million, 30 Million or what!!  Apparently that depended on whether or not you counted illegal aliens, and if you got caught doing that the numbers changed but not in any proportion to how many illegal aliens that our government told us that there was supposed to be.

For example, some Left Wing Strategist would come on and say that there were 38 Million uninsured but if we took out illegal aliens then there was 20 Million uninsured which (where I went to school) would mean that there were 18 Million illegal aliens, right?  But that same strategist would talk about the 50 Million aliens, is that legal, illegal and space?   Again, the head is hurting and blood has started to come out of my ears and don’t even get me started about the President’s plan to legalize the 50 Million which would mean that 88 Million covered (I think).

It only gets worse.  Now we are told that despite this bill which is 2,086 pages (or something like that) 25 Million people who are not illegal aliens will remain uninsured.  What????  Does that mean that we are going through all this for less than 25 Million people and it costs 2.5 Trillion Dollars?   Wouldn’t it be cheaper to provide these people with free health care for life with a bill of about 50 pages?  I don’t know I am entirely confused by now.

So at this point I am thinking screw how many it covers, we will never know how many it covers and if we push the point the Administration will start saying things like “87 Million people were insured or saved by the health care bill” and my head really will explode.

If we give up (in the interest of preventing our heads for exploding) on arguing the actual number covered, the voodoo math does not go away.  Let’s look at the number of people dying through lack of insurance.  Now I am not meaning to sound like a total ass, but I have never driven by or gone to a hospital with a large group of dispirited individuals hanging around outside waiting to die because the hospital would not see them, but if we listen to the horror stories that have been told during this debate then we have to assume that it happens. The voodoo math part of it is that the number of those dying does not maintain any type of consistency.   I know that it started out this year (when the  health care debate began) at 18,000 per year but due to voodoo math the number has grown astronomically to 45,000 a year, at least that is the number that was thrown around in yesterday’s Senate debate.

Well okay then, 45,000 is a lot of people.  That number might pale in comparison to the 1.3 Million Abortions that are performed in the US each year, but I digress.  Even a mean old conservative like me doesn’t want to be responsible for the death of 45,000 uninsured people.   And as Debbie Stebenow and her pals kept reminding me yesterday that is THIS year.  Well, at least when this monster of a bill is past those 45,000 will be safe right?

Not so fast.  Even though the bill may pass this year, and we will start paying for it (and paying, and paying) this year, the actual benefit does not begin until four years from the date the bill is passed.  What?  Do you mean to tell me that 180,000 people are going to die before this bill takes effect?  That seems to be the case.  But surely there must be some good reason for that.    Not really.  The reason if you choose to believe it, and if you have believed everything up to now why stop?  Is that the Democrats want this bill to APPEAR budget neutral.  Really, that’s it.  They are despite the tears (real or imagined) shed by such tough old “Progressives with guts” as Alan Grayson the Left is so concerned about the budget that they are willing to let a number that is VERY close to a 1/4 of a Million people die in order to preserve it’s illusion of neutrality.

And WE are the mean, heartless and cruel party?  Something just doesn’t add up.