We all know the old saying. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. As I brought an apple to work today i thought about that and the possibility to convert this into truly bipartisan health reform. We would get health care for all with support from the fruit farmers. On top of taht it would be cheap. Even if we paid $1.00 per apple, it would still only cost $365.00 per person per annum. Much cheaper than what we have right now. How could that go wrong?
Of course I had to figure out how many apples we need first of all. The latest CIA factbook figure lists the population of the USA as 307,212,123 as of July last year. I’m going to work with 310,000,000 to make it easy. 2 significant digits is good enough for me. Multiply that with 365 and we find that we need around 11o billion apples a year to keep the doctor away from from Americans. I’m sure that all the doctors and their families don’t really want to do that, so I’ll have to do some subtraction. Accorting to Bureau of Labor Statistics there were about 660,000 doctors in 2008. That includes dentists and medical doctors, but no other health care professionals. With the census number of average family size of 2.59 people the size of the group of non-doctor-repelling people would be approximately 1.7 million people. After recalculating I still end up with 110 billion apples. As far as the need for apples go, doctors are insignificant.
Next question is of course, how many apples are produced in the US annually? According to the US Apple Association the average in the early 2000s was about 230 million 42 lb units (in case you wonder that is equivalent of a bushel). This figure is confirmed by USDA figures. Yahoo! answers says that you get about 3 apples to a pound, which would mean that the total US apple production would be approximately 29 billion apples annually. That means that to be able to keep each American with an apple a day we would have to quadruple apple production, or we could import the rest. The funny thing is that, at the moment, the US exports about 2.5 times as many apples as it imports. There is no way every American could get an apple a day. Probably more like an apple every 3 to 4 days. And that would not keep the doctor away.
I was hoping that I had landed on the panacea of bipartisan healt care reform, but it turns out, once again, that we don’t have the resources to keep people healthy. I guess I’ll go back to arguing for a single payer system.
