Sunday, November 23, 2008

Pay Ethiopia's health care bills for a thousand years

For the price of the Iraq War, we could pay Ethiopia's health care bills for a thousand years.

Ethiopia has a population of about 78 million. Per capita health care expenditures in Ethiopia are $21, about 1/300 of American health care expenditures. At this price, paying health care bills for Ethiopia for the next thousand years would cost $1.64 trillion, which is $1.36 trillion less than Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes' estimate of $3 trillion for the total cost of the Iraq War.

Image used under a Creative Commons license from LindsayStark.