As I was reading about the Democratic candidates forum in Nevada yesterday, I realized that both Bill Richardson and John Edwards need some math help. (I posted more about this subject on my blog)

Both claimed that for between $90 and $120 Billion dollars a year they can provide “universal health care” for America. Now, the WaPo and www.americansforrichardson.org website don’t make it clear if that price is for all 320 million of us, or just the 46 million without health coverage. Either way, these guys need to look at their numbers, and to give them the benefit of the doubt, I’ll use the premise they are only talking about the uninsured. If I speculated that they were going to cover all of us then it becomes too funny to think about.

Both claim that they won’t have to create a new department to make this happen, meaning that either Medicare, or VA will take on the job. Considering the bad press Walter Reed and the rest of the VA system has been getting I’m sure folks will line¬†up to go there.

Back to the math, if either or both are only talking about the 45 million or so without coverage, that means that they are going to get Medicare to cover them for about $2600 per year. Currently Medicare covers just over 30 million people with a budget of $300 Billion. That comes out to $10,000 per year per person covered. How exactly are they going to get that number cut by 75%?

And, if it’s possible to do that, why not just lower the cost for everyone covered? Using their claimed numbers from yesterday we should be able to cut the Medicare budget by 1/3 from it’s current level and still cover the 76 million uninsured and elderly who would be eligible.

Universal health care polls great. Folks love the idea of everyone being covered, and no worries about health care. The truth is though, universal coverage isn’t going to come cheap, and it’s not going to come easy.

The sad thing is Dennis Kucinich might have been the voice of reason in his party yesterday. He was brave enough to say that to make universal coverage work we need to scrap everything we have now and start from scratch. It’s not a popular idea, but he’s right it’s probably the only way to make the dream of universal coverage reality.