Saturday, June 06, 2009

Your healthcare tax dollars at work - a Trillion dollars just doesn't go as far as it used to!


From the Dow Jones Newswire comes a thought provoking observation,

Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist with the National Institutes of Health and brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, put into perspective the more than $2 trillion spent on healthcare in the U.S. every year.

"People don't have any idea of what a trillion is," said Emanuel, pointing out that healthcare's steady increase will theoretically consume the entire economy one day.

He gave a shocking math lesson:

How long ago was a million seconds?

Less than two weeks ago.

How long ago was a billion seconds?

About the time when President Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974.

How long ago was a trillion seconds?

30,000 B.C. - which was 15,000 years before the first human stepped on North America.

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