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Quote by: PatrickHenry You ever hear of the pharmaceutical industry? |
But seriously, it's too much money unless it's just give aways or there's some
massive research effort.
Let's say 15% of the population would fall under this elderly category.
Then assume 40% of them had some relatively special or expensive drug prescriptions (to me that seems high but we've got a society that seems to pop pills for everything now)
Then let's say that only half of those people really needed assistance affording this.
So 300 million * 15% * 40% * 50% = 9 million people (so this is just a rough guess of how many might really benefit from this program)
So we take $1,200,000,000,000 (I want to show all the zeroes) and divide it by 9 million people to get $133,000 per person!!! That's ridiculous. How many people can even save that much cash and yet we spend that (supposedly) on medication for someone. I don't mean to sound cruel but if this is for elderly people then how much time are they going to have to benefit from these anyway? (I tend to be skeptical of the benefits of a lot of medications. I've seen people who take maybe 8 pills a day for different things, and though I can't truly say it's unnecessary it just seems a disturbing trend) We hear politicians talk about feeding starving children or something but then when it comes time to actually spending the money they hand it their pharmaceutical buddies who probably pocket most the money anyway. How often do they stop an consider how this drain is going to affect others ... who are going to have to live a lot longer probably. Again, I'm not trying to be callous but it seems a real concern.
Lets assume basic grains cost $1/pound in bulk. If it would take 200 pounds of these to feed someone for a year, then that could be $200/year to feed someone who literally had no food (I think that's a reasonable estimate for costs). Ok so let's take $1,200,000,000,000 and divide it by $200.
So we could probably hand 6,000,000,000 people each 200 pounds of basic foodstuffs and feed half the world for the cost of simply the money blown on "Bush's buddies" (that's how I see it).
Of course I don't want to misrepresent this. Government wouldn't truly be growing any of this food but using the same value of resources it diverts into this drug scam we could probably feed every starving person in the world for half a decade. I'm not a big charity proponent but if we're going to do something in the name of compassion, then it should be serious. Scamming everyone isn't compassion. I truly think this money, and other resources, are being pumping into things people would have serious problems with, if they knew. Call me paranoid but that's truly what I think's going on and even if Bush was out of office, it wouldn't stop.