Quote Originally Posted by SadisticNature View Post
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.
Obama's plan costs $1 trillion a year for the first 10 years ONLY. Not only that, but the tax increases to pay for it kick in immediately, yet no benefits are available for at least two more years. Once the benefits kick in, and the operating costs exceed what the federal government has collected from the citizens, taxes will be raised yet again, funding to education, medicare, medicaid, social security and any other government program will be cut to compensate.

300 million people are eventually going to be covered by the SAME insurer. And this insurer is the same "entity" that runs the Postal Service (which is in shambles), social security (which is broke), medicare (which is faltering), medicaid (which is also having difficulty), etc. And we're supposed to feel confident in their abilities????