I can only surmise that commercial insurance overpays.
I tried to google up some numbers which is hard. Maybe an annual report for United/Aetna/Anthem would get some numbers.
At first, I thought maybe it was lower costs for others. This gives about $10k a year per medicare patient, which do tend to be sicker. Your commercial insurance fees are about $14.4k for 2 people, or 7.7k for 2 relatively healthy people.
Medicaid plans are probably about 80% from those figures, but that will vary by state.
I found this chart which lists US spending per capita at almost 10k for 2015.
At 300 million people that would work out to 3 billion USD right? Which is way off from the 0.88 billion. Maybe the 0.88 billion is only the private sector, and medicare HMOs aren’t part of that figure. Roughly 1/4 expenditure by working people and 3/4ths by retirees would make sense.
I mean she either lied or remembered wrong. It’s a stupid thing either way, but it did happen.
Trying to score “cool” points is something I wish our politicians would stop doing. It rarely works and usually results in them looking like morons.
Still, she could parley this into something interesting; “Well, okay … yeah, I was listening to them while lighting up because maybe I did it a bit after college, as well.” Then we get into a conversation about legalization.
What followed was a game of telephone that, as the New York Times documented in a story on Wednesday, totally mangled the context of Harris’s words. A Monday article from the cannabis publication Marijuana Moment described the exchange this way: “And what was playing in the background when a young Kamala Harris was hitting a joint? ‘Oh yeah, definitely Snoop. Tupac for sure,’ she said.” That description was screen-shotted in a viral tweetfrom a left-wing account that noted that Harris graduated from college before Tupac or Snoop had released an album. This was followed by a lot of conservative publications and pundits noting this apparent discrepancy; Fox and Friends ran a deceptively edited version of the interview (omitting the original, broader question about what music she liked) and criticized her for being inauthentic. “For better or for worse, Donald Trump shows you exactly what he’s doing every day and who he is,” host Brian Kilmeade said.
This is bizarre on a couple levels. For one, Harris didn’t do what her critics say she did—she never said she was listening to Snoop and Tupac while getting high in college. It would be a bizarre claim if she did, because she almost certainly was not feigning a love for hip-hop just to appeal to Breakfast Club listeners: She’s previously talked about her fondness for A Tribe Called Quest and Too Short. Even if you listen to the interview and decide that she was saying she listened to Tupac and Snoop in college, the simplest explanation is that she just misremembered what music came out when decades ago. There’s no version of this story in which it makes sense to drag Harris, or to devote multiple articles to the exchange.
This dynamic isn’t just bad because it clogs up our feeds with nonsense, and necessitates debunking. It ends up taking up space that could be occupied by more productive debates. It seems likely that all of the Democratic presidential contenders, save perhaps Joe Biden, will support cannabis legalization, but Harris is right that that’s far from the end of the story. Along with the question of how to issue DUIs for marijuana users, there’s debates to be had over whether and how to expunge the records of drug offenders, how licensing should work for legal cannabis businesses, and how to enact laws that actually bring an end to black market weed businesses, which has so far been a struggle in states that have legalized pot.
All of these issues are a lot more important than whether Kamala Harris tried too hard to seem cool on the radio. Whether Americans actually want to talk about them remains to be seen.
