Carol Platt Liebau: The Real Priority

Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Real Priority

Hillary Clinton is offering a $110 billion per year health plan.

All well and good, but it strikes me that the best way to ensure that Americans remain healthy is to provide some strong leadership and meaningful protection from terrorist attacks.

2 Comments:

Blogger Earth to Carol said...

Seriously what the heck does protection from your terrorists have to do with good medical care? At best perhaps just that Bush would like to line his war profiteering cronies with tax payer's money to such an extent that they cannot afford their health insurance premiums. Whatever happened to family values, Carol?

1:13 AM  
Blogger Chris Crawford said...

Ms. Liebau has chosen a particularly poor comparison. Let's use as a baseline the 5 years from 1997 through 2001 when, presumably because the show was being run by Democrats, there was no significant effort to protect Americans from terrorism. During those five years, 3,000 Americans died due to terrorism. In the six years since that date, we have spent or committed over a trillion dollars to prevent terrorism, and we have had no deaths due to terrorism (assuming you're willing to ignore the roughly 4,000 deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan). So we've spent $300 million on each life we have saved.

Now let's compare this with some of the death rates for some standard diseases:

Diabetes milletus: 414,000
Septicemia: 48,000
malignant neoplasms of lymphatic and hematopoietic tissues: 234,000
ischemic heart disease: 3,240,000
pneumonia and influenza: 540,000

We have lost just under 3,000 people to drowning in the last six years -- perhaps we should spend a trillion dollars on a Department of Boating Safety (and invade Venice, too -- they use a lot of boats)

We have lost over 3,000 people due to tripping, slipping, and stumbling -- perhaps we need a trillion-dollar program to install foam cushioning on every surface in the country.

We've lost even more people due to falls involving beds, chairs, or other furniture -- obviously, we need to spend at least a few hundred billion on a new Department of Furniture Safety. Perhaps we should investigate whether al-Qaeda has infiltrated our furniture manufacturers.

Swimming pools have been another huge killer -- over 3,000 deaths from these in the last six years. Obviously, we've got to do something to protect Americans from this massive threat.

And let's not forget all those Islamofascist animals out to get us: snakes, spiders, wild animals, even Islamofascist dogs! Together, they killed a mere 1,200 people, but surely we ought to spend a few hundred billion protecting Americans from these insidious forces of darkness.

Gee, Ms. Clinton's paltry hundred billion seems pretty chintzy, doesn't it?

8:50 AM  

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