Magnitude, Proportionality & Purpose

About: - wolfram|alpha

How many are we?

The U.S. population clock pegs us at 307,595,188 as of this writing.

We are distributed in ~ 19,355 cities, but only 26 are over 1/2 million. Those ~ 10,000+ are 2578. I live in a city of 26k which is pretty small.

Population size category (1998)	Percent change	Number if cities
1,000,000 or more	3.5	9
500,000 - 999,999	2	17
250,000 - 499,999	4.8	41
100,000 - 249,999	7.8	151
50,000 - 99,999	8.2	354
10,000 - 49,999	8.6	2006
All cities with populations 10K or more	6.6	2578

Age structure

(2009 est.)

0-14 years: 20.2% (male 31,639,127/female 30,305,704)
15-64 years: 67.0% (male 102,665,043/female 103,129,321)
65 years and over: 12.8% (male 16,901,232/female 22,571,696)

Number of Hospitals = 5708

Number of Community Health Centers (free & otherwise) 3650 or ~1200 depending where you google.

These are the numbers we need (& more) to grasp the magnitude of what the health care legislation is attempting to change. This is just a start. Anyone who doesn't have these numbers has another agenda. 9027 details some statistics which helps you grasp millions & billions as large numbers!

An MRI costs ~ 3,000,000 & a good technician draws ~ $100,000 salary per year. For the current estimated cost of one Trillion$$$$$$ 250,000 of these could be added (with 10 top technicians each) to the health care system (or ~ 96 per city of 10k or more people) - perhaps a bit excessive. What else could be added that would make health care less scarce?

I would like to know:

How many bureaucrats are being added vs doctors, nurses & other health care givers.
How much does it cost to build a new Community Health Center vs a Hospital
The distribution of illnesses by cause & by demographic. (hierarchical pie charts would be nice)
The distrubution/availability of drugs
... tbd

Comments

Seth says

source: mr above
I could probably extract & produce a semantic web or graphic of the bills in Congress eventually, but I fear what such discoveries made public

Thing is that there is no place where people can go and grock what all is planned in some kind of coherent form. We have to rely on the congressional budget office and what the politicians tell us. There really should be a website that is run by the people to audit how the government is spending our money. Like i mentioned before, there are actually people working on creating such things. Me thinks any efforts you have to expend would be well served by tuning into what they are doing.

Mark de LA says

P.S. I would untax everything related to health care if devoted to producing more health care resources like hospitals, clinics, doctors, nurses, alternative health facilities & the like. I suspect that would dissolve the problem.

Mark de LA says

seth 2009-10-02 08:32:49 12665

I'm not quite sure what this item is about. But here are some new figures about the 1 trillion for health insurance foretold by the Baucus Bill ...

source: NYT
The bill provides $463 billion in subsidies over 10 years to help lower-income people buy insurance.

... which is a bit under half of the trillion. So i guess $537 billion goes to other stuff like the bureaucracy, research, and encouraging new doctors. I'm not about that last part ... its worth a bit of a study. It would be nice to see a pie chart of where the Trillion-over-10-years goes.

The current effort seems to be about insurance & bureaucracy my effort is about improving health care availability by making more health care facilities, equipment & personnel available with more choices where it is needed. The corrollary to that is with greater supply & choices comes reduced prices & more competition. The federal government sector seems to be the only one increasing employment (~25,000).

Mark de LA says

seth 2009-11-11 16:49:01 12665

source: mr above
I could probably extract & produce a semantic web or graphic of the bills in Congress eventually, but I fear what such discoveries made public

Last time you mentioned such a thing I couldn't find anything but talk. www.govtrack.us is a good site. As I say, so what. If we knew, the game is still on. You, yourself said that even with draconian fines & jail, you support the bill. I, otoh, don't find that a government review of my policy suggesting it lacking & requiring me to buy a new one at a higher price very helpful at all - especially with fine & prison in the government's stack of tricks to force their conclusion. You made up your mind regardless of the facts about the bill. Most people do because they would prefer not to think of those kinds of things. It clogs their mind or they prefer to sleep or they prefer their partisan representation. Do you think the facts about a bill you prefer from your partisan viewpoint are going to change your mind? Sacrificing the 90% who do have health insurance for the 10% who don't violates the title of the bill itself. How much farther do you need to read?

Magnitude, Proportionality & Purpose

About: - wolfram|alpha

Age structure

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