Hopey McChange is not offering a greater supply, and he is offering to subsidize demand even more. Guess what that’s going to do for spending?

We currently spend about $2.4T (2008 numbers from here) on healthcare in this country. That’s nearly 10 times what your proposal would bring in.

Further, from that link:

The annual premium that a health insurer charges an employer for a health plan covering a family of four averaged $12,700 in 2008. Workers contributed nearly $3,400, or 12 percent more than they did in 2007.

$96.40 per month is about $1150 a year. If you take the $12.7K number above and divide by four, you get over $3K per person — about three times the $96.40 premium.

And as someone whose wife recently had to make a visit to the emergency room and just got an $800 bill for the co-pay, I can tell you that the premiums charged are only a portion of what the out-of-pocket cost would be.

So even if you believe Barack’s claims about reining in the cost model (which I don’t, unless they’re willing to significantly limit — i.e. ration — care), it will still be fabulously more expensive than a $96.40 premium.

And that doesn’t take into account that of 300 million residents, only somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million draw a paycheck. Others are kids or getting social security or other welfare programs, but you can expect that the burden on the taxpayers will be significantly higher than $96.40 per month to cover it.

(This further underscores, of course, the ridiculously low $96.40 premium, which is charged to seniors — a group which spends disproportionately higher than folks in my demographic on health care).

If you stopped taking medicare taxes out of everyone’s paycheck, and just charged them the 96.40 a month, putting everyone in the country onto medicare (which would be a revenue of somewhere around $28 Billion a month from 300 million people) would that provide care for every American without them needing private insurance companies at all?

I guess what I am asking is how much money would it take to provide health care to every American every month?