A Few Billion Dollars More

My granddaughter just had her 2nd birthday recently, which is a milestone for her -- a baby with a birth defect. She needed an operation to repair her abdomen immediately after she was born by C section in an emergency room. My daughter and her new baby were both kept in the hospital for a couple weeks after that, and it was hard on everyone involved to maintain jobs and lives amidst that emotional time.

We just recently learned that the entire cost of that treatment was some $250,000.

Both of them are worth far more than that to us, of course. How many babies are born in the world without the benefit of such miraculous medicine? And how many people could afford that cost, in any case? Certainly not us. That cost was picked up by the government, simply because my daughter was no longer covered by our insurance, and neither she nor the father had a job at the time. Of course, I mean the taxpayers when I say government -- that is us, too.

If this had happened a few years earlier, while she was still younger than the cutoff age for dependent children with our health insurance, then my wife and I would have had to pay some portion of that money -- probably around $80,000. We would have had trouble making such a payment in addition to mortgages, cars, food and even our normal healthcare costs. But we would have unquestionably undergone any hardship to keep our child and grandchild alive, no matter what the cost.

There is another cost to the government, and us taxpayers -- the cost of killing people. So far the wars we are currently fighting, including the "war on terror" have cost around a half trillion dollars, rounding off a little.

We might have killed around 100,000 people so far, but of course nobody really knows. But lets just say it was only 50,000. That is about $10 million per dead body. Now, how many more people do we have to kill before the wars are "won"? Another "50,000"? Can we afford to kill very many more at this rate? What if we kill a million more and still lose, like in Vietnam?

I wish we didn't have to kill anybody. It seems kind of a waste of money to kill people. Everyone is going to die anyway, no matter what. Death is free to everyone, except the insurance companies (sometimes) and whoever pays for the funerals.

You may say that those war deaths were necessary -- to keep America "safe". Even so, I think the $250,000 to keep my granddaughter alive was a far better bargain. At least she smiles that million dollar smile and makes a lot of other people happy. Can you say the same for any corpse?