$50 Million Per Patient: The High Cost of Healthcare

The New York Times, hardly a bastion of conservative thought, recently published a piece about the virtually empty U.S. built Ebola clinics in the African nation of Liberia. All part of Community Organizer in Chief Barack Obama’s day late response to the Ebola outbreak in the West African country.

Obama you may recall plodded along while, delaying the U.S. response to the epidemic that saw Liberia hit with 9,862 cases of Ebola which left a devastating 4408 dead. The Times reported that Worldwide there were 25,500 cases and 10,500 dead; so clearly Liberia was at the epicenter of the death toll, accounting for nearly half of the dead.

So Obama’s response was to hire a political hack, Democrat strategist, Ron Klain to be the Ebola Czar who departed just a short time into his projected tenure. Next the Community Organizer decided he would send nearly 3000 members of the military to help set up 11 Ebola Treatment Units (ETU). The United States outlay for this adventure was $1.4 billion.

So…how many patients did this project treat? How Many lives did it save? The grand total is 28. No that’s not a typo…28! Do the math; that works out to be $50 million per patient. These people spend so much time worry about the optics/politics of things that they delayed the response until after the epidemic had peaked.

This should be yet another glaring example of how wrong all those folks who believe that the government has all the answers or solutions to problems. The local, more nimble and largely privately funded response proved to be not only more effective, but also less expensive. Imagine these are the clowns who voted to take over a huge segment of our economy and put themselves in charge of our healthcare.

Government is a large, lumbering, slow moving mess that is not equipped to deal with anything in a timely or effective manner. Private enterprise is a clear cut more effective and cost effective manner for addressing major problems.