Is This A Misprint?

We expect nothing less than for Leviathan to tragically and grotesquely squander resources; still, even we who utterly oppose the State must wonder whether “$167.9 million” is a typo:

Vermont had around 43,000 uninsured residents before the Affordable Care Act—the lowest number of any state in the nation—but has spent more federal money per uninsured resident than any other state, some $167.9 million each.

If I’m not too staggered to calculate correctly, that totals over $7.2 billion. Imagine employing whole bureaucracies to steal that much loot from Americans in the first place—Americans, I might add, who can’t meet their mortgage payments nor find jobs and whose children move back home because they can’t either. Then imagine wasting the plunder so outrageously, with politicians and their cronies instead of those 43,000 uninsured becoming multi-millionaires.

If that doesn’t move serfs to revolution, what will?

Update: It seems I was indeed too staggered to calculate correctly. A friend noticed that the total should be $7.2 trillion, not billion. Which, of course, means that Newsweek did indeed err. Jeffrey Wozniak tells me someone there caught the mistake and has since corrected “each” to “total.” But, as a second friend remarks, “$3904.65 apiece is [still] an awful lot.”

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8:33 am on September 17, 2014