Pet food? Health care and pet food? No, dear reader, Dr Fine hasn’t gone crazy. There really is a link.
In the Wall Street Journal of February 10, the distinguished long-time Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, who was arguing for desperately needed military aid to Ukraine, claimed that by spending an extra $35 billion, Russia was trying to bluff the US and Western Europe into backing down and deserting Ukraine, which would be a disaster for democracy and for the free world. I strongly agree with Mr. Jenkins on that. As he made his argument, though, Mr. Holman said $35 Billion is a quarter of what the US spends annually on pet supplies, to give the $35 billion Russia is threatening to spend some context.
And that got me thinking about numbers because if $35 billion is a quarter of what we spend on pet supplies, that means we spend about four times that amount — or $140 billion — on pet supplies, a number that rang a bell for me.
It rang a bell because I happened to know that we spend about $165 billion on primary care each year in the US. If Mr. Holman is correct, we spend almost as much on our pets as we spend on providing basic health care to all American humans. Couldn’t be, right?
So I fact checked a little. I looked up the number, and if turns out dear Mr. Holman missed the mark. He was off by a factor of two. It turns out, according to Forbes, that we spend $70 billion on pet supplies, not $140 billion.
I think we can forgive Mr. Holman for confusing one-quarter with one-half because, at the end of the day, none of us should really care how much Americans spend on pet supplies. (We should care desperately about supporting the Ukraine, and defeating Putin, the last thing we need right now being another tinhorn dictator of the Russian description – the world having seen more than enough of those.)
But there is still a lesson here. Fifty-seven percent of American adults, or about 148 million people, don’t have a family doctor aka primary care clinician/practice. Getting every American a family doctor aka primary care clinician/practice would cost $74 billion, which is about the cost of what Americans DO spend on pet supplies. Which means we could build a health care system in the US for what we spend on dog food, more or less. The cost, to badly mix a metaphor, is just chicken feed.
That we don’t build a health care system that provides primary care to all Americans is just crazy. For the cost of kitty litter! For next to nothing, we can actually keep health care in America from going to the dogs.
Makes a grown man want to howl.
