Wired Cola

I have an imaginary evil twin, named Beau. Beau is a very wicked alter ego, and does all sorts of things I wouldn't contemplate: devilish advocacy, reading Ayn Rand novels, trying to get pregnant women to drink more.

Wait, I did that one? I'm sure I had a good reason....

Anyways, the other day I was talking to Beau about health care, and Beau seemed eager to engage me. I of course believe that medicine is great, but Beau, well, he reads a lot and then sometimes I think he says things just to annoy me.

This is Beau:

Why do you hate Cuba so much, anyway? Good health care, you know, world class. Okay, so what about Costa Rica, then? They spend about 1/16 what the US does on health care and they live just as long as average Americans.

I told Beau this was very convincing that health care costs were out of control and Something Needed to be Done, and since US expenditures were about twice what they are in other G-7 countries, maybe they needed a public health care system.

Dummy [Beau is very rude sometimes!], this doesn't mean the US needs to spend half as much. It means $273/a being the amount of actual health care (per capita) needed to hit a US-style life expectancy, health care above this annualized amount is a luxury good, not a necessity for life. Since that's less than 1/16th the total per capita amount the US actually spends, Beau says the other 15/16 of US health care expenditures can be quantified as some combination of witch doctoring, cosmetic procedures, or buying the ability to eat cheeseburgers without dying young. Beau says it's a bad choice to spend public money on cheeseburger subsidies.

You can see what kind of monster Beau is. When I last left him, he was saying how he wanted to nationalize fitness centres and make attendance mandatory for anyone with a BMI over 25. I think Beau drinks too much beer sometimes, and focuses on the wrong sorts of solutions. Or problems. I can never quite remember.