Obama's Healthcare - Fuzzy Math

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

It looks like the Obama administration is being called out on their numbers concerning Healthcare. They still insist that savings will be a main result of the bill they just passed.

Click title of this post for the full story.

But you don't need an economics degree to follow this one. All you have to do is remember your fractions.

The health care law expands coverage, reducing the number of uninsured by more than 32 million, although about 24 million will remain without coverage.

Still, the share of the population with insurance will go up by nearly 10 percentage points, to about 93 percent. And that makes a difference in the numbers.

If you divide total national health care spending by a bigger number of insured people, you get a smaller per-person result.

It's an interesting statistic, but it doesn't mean the problem of rising costs is solved.

"It's not that it's false, it's just that it will be a little misleading," John Allen Paulos, a mathematics professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, said of the White House number, calling it an "apples-to-oranges miscomparison."

Consider an imaginary country with just three citizens, Peter, Paul and Mary. Peter has health coverage but Paul and Mary are uninsured. Peter spends $1,000 on health care, but Paul and Mary can only afford $500 apiece because they lack coverage. Total national spending: $2,000. National spending per insured person: $2,000.

Now suppose a law gets passed to expand coverage. Paul gets insurance, but Mary remains uninsured. Now Peter and Paul are spending $1,000 apiece. Paul spends more than when he was uninsured, so total national health spending goes up to $2,500.

But because more people are covered, spending per insured person goes down to $1,250.

It's a simplistic comparison, but would you call that a savings?

It certainly doesn't take much to figure out that this will cost us more than save anything. Not to mention the cost we will pay when initiative to develop new drugs and treatment come to a halt.