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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/28/12

Tax Dollars Better Spent on Life or Death?

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Where should a government decide to spend their money?  National defense or the health of the nation?  A faction of Americans are passionately against Obamacare.  Their reasoning is the expense on our tax dollars.  However, there is also a cost by not having Obamacare--Americans will die.  If you're against Obamacare, you also don't care about Americans living.  You don't care that get to breathe, or have a better quality of life.  Someone who uses cost in tax dollars as their objection does not have a respectable position if they also have no problem in giving the Pentagon a blank check. 

91,250 Americans die each year because we do not have the proper healthcare in this country like the other free western democracies.  Ninety-one thousand, two-hundred and fifty Americans are dead each year--and we can save them at just the cost of 50 billion dollars a year.  Now some argue that this too much of a burden on our tax dollars.  However, where is this same complaint when the Pentagon spent 228 billion dollars on the f-22 raptor that we have not yet used in combat in ten years?  Aside from the alternative mode for the transformer Starscream, this plane serves no purpose.  Yet instead of putting that money toward Obamacare and saving 365,000 lives in four years we can use it to buy planes that we don't need.  We spend 720 billion a year on these wars with no end, or even a mean in sight.  We gave Wall Street 750 billion, but spending 50 billion a year to keep just under a hundred thousand Americans alive is a waste of tax dollars.  These banks may have been to big to fail, but then are we saying these lives are too small to save?  Why the are we fighting these wars if our greatest enemy is our own ignorance and greed?

Here are some raw facts about the math and tax dollars with Obamacare compared to the war budget.  We lost 3000 lives on 9/11. In the ten years since we have spent 6.7 trillion dollars on defense and have lost another 6200 American lives in these wars.  250 Americans die every day without healthcare. That's a 9/11 in 12 days. And 91,250 deaths a year. These lives can be saved at just 50 billion a year. So at 500 billion after ten years it i s still just 1/13th of what these wars have cost us and saves just under 100 thousand lives a year. With these numbers how can an American be so up in arms against Obamacare and its cost, but not care about what these wars are costing us?  Is it because it's from a democrat, do they not understand the plan, do they not understand the healthcare problem, do they not understand math, or do they really just don't give a crap if Americans die as long as we are doing it to ourselves?       

Now I am not going to say that the people against Obamacare don't care about Americans dying.  But they do use the cost in tax dollars as their reason against it.  I am just going to show where else our tax dollars go.  If their position is that it is a waste of tax dollars, why are they not complaining about what we spend on defense?  80% of our budget is spent on defense.  If the concern is really our debt, spending money on defense should be of a far larger concern than what we spend on healthcare.  Think of it this way, someone buys a pack of cigarettes for ten dollars each and also a one dollar pack of gum, three times a day.  In an effort to spend less money this person decides not to stop buying the cigarettes but instead just avoid buying the pack of gum.  This stupidity is the same logic in crying about the cost of healthcare, but not what our defense budget is costing us.  Yes, a democratic president came up with this health care reform plan, but just because you are a republican you don't have to be against it.  What is right is right, and if you don't choose between right and wrong, but instead along party lines you are abusing the right to choose. 

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Drew D'Amato is the author of the novels Social Studies and Bloodlines. He also has a masters degree in history, and has taught at the high school and college levels. When not writing he spends his time getting himself into trouble.
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