Forty Percent

Forty percent. That's how much of the health-care dollars spent in the US are spent by federal and state governments through Medicare and Medicaid. And, on average these are the expensive health-care patients, namely, the elderly and the poor.

We've all heard the 'keep the government away from my Medicare' story coming out of the public forums and to explain this seemingly inexplicable contradiction I suggest you spend an afternoon watching Fox News and then read Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

I suppose this applies to the 'birthers' as well. President Obama would always be illegitimate in some peoples' eyes - if it's not his birth certificate it would be the swearing in or some other nonsense issue.

The obvious contradiction of saying that the elderly and our veterans can have a government form of health-care insurance but that the rest of us cannot is so ridiculous as to be laughable.