The claim made which I was refuting was that 48 hours of the cost of the Obama plan was more than the entire yearly profits of the insurance industry.

48 hours is 2 days. There are 365 days in a year. This is how one arrives at 365/2 .

The Obama plan costs $1 trillion/year.

Hence the contribution of this one company's profit (purely in terms of the measure I didn't even propose) is $438 billion.

There seems to be a serious aversion on this forum to people reading the entirety of an argument or actually attempting to do the math before presenting numerical claims.

Quote Originally Posted by DuncanONeil View Post
$2.4 in operating profit in one year is to be multiplied by 365 and divided by 2? You can not mean that $438b is available from this one company, unless you are proposing to take all their funds! But you are speaking of profits, "(t)he profits of every health insurance company is way larger than this sum."
How do you arrive at 365/2?
Taking the money spent on care ($2.26t) and subtracting Federal Medicare ($440b) and Medicaid ($204b) money and applying the profit ratio (2.2%, media reported) of the insurers results in about $35.5 billion. Industry wide! About 1/10 of your figure from one company. This is a serious dichotomy!

How can we resolve this?