Meaningful Numbers on Children's Health Care Bill

The NYT did a decent job reporting on the bill passed by the House to reauthorize the State Children's Health Insurance Program, except when it came to reporting to the tab. The article gives us three sentences that look like a parody on the Daily Show: "The federal government is spending $5 billion a year on the program. At that rate, it would spend $25 billion in the next five years. The Senate bill would provide an additional $35 billion over five years, for a total of $60 billion. The House bill would provide $50 billion, for a $75 billion total." Got that? Everyone know exactly what the burden of this bill be for the public? Expressing costs in billions of dollars or tens of billions of dolllars is sort of like a fraternity ritual. It is very meaningful to a tiny number of budget wonks, but almost completely meaningless to anyone else. Add or subtract a zero from these numbers and they would probably mean the same thing to the vast majority of NYT readers. Okay, so here's the boring numbers, the $10 billion a year proposed under the Senate bill comes to about 0.3 percent of projected federal spending over the next five years or $33 of spending per person, per year. The $15 billion a year proposed in the House Bill is approximately 0.5 percent of projected spending, or $50 per person, per year.

--Dean Baker