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24% of the entire US federal Medicare budget every year is dedicated SOLELY to dialysis[1], for K-12 we spend nearly a trillion every year, with increasingly worse results [2]. This is less than two years of spending on education spread across 30. The idea that the US does not spend a lot of money on things like education and healthcare is so unbelievably wrong it makes me think I'm taking crazy pills. We spend so much on these things and get essentially nothing for it, because people just keep thinking we don't spend money on it instead of putting pressure to investigate why our public services are money furnaces that turns taxpayer funds into illiterate adults[3].

Edited to add a missed word.

[1] https://www.kidney.org/federal-investment [2] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 [3] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...



24% of the entire US federal budget every year is dedicated SOLELY to dialysis[1]

This seemed implausible and indeed the linked page doesn't say that. It says that 24% of Medicare spending goes to patients with kidney disease. Medicare is 14% of the Federal budget: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-government-s...

That's about 3.3% of the Federal budget going to patients with kidney disease. Since kidney disease is comorbid with other health problems it's not clear how much of that spending is for dialysis, though it is still a lot of spending on people with kidney disease.


You are absolutely right, I missed a word there - edited to reflect.


Since this is HN where the house style is

  -Wpedantic -Werror
I'll note that the correction is flawed too: it's 24% of Medicare (the program for old people), not Medicaid (the program for low income people).




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