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Government Healthcare Costs

Over the course of a lifetime, what is the average cost to each U.S. household of government health and healthcare programs?

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In 2024, federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. spent $2.6 trillion on health and healthcare programs. This is an average of $19,409 for every household in the nation. Over the average U.S. lifespan of 79 years, this amounts to $1,533,311 per household. In addition to these government expenses, Americans also pay substantial costs for their own healthcare. This includes employer-provided health insurance, which is ultimately borne by employees through reduced wages.

DocumentationGovernment Healthcare Spending Total Healthcare Spending Employer-Provided Insurance U.S. Life Expectancy

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Covid Vaccine Effects

CNN’s Dana Bash claims “there is data, upon data, upon data” proving that the Covid vaccine “prevented deaths,” and Google Gemini asserts she is right.

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IN FACT, the most reliable and objective data provide no evidence that Covid-19 mRNA vaccines prevented more deaths than they caused, and allegations to the contrary are fatally flawed. Here are the specifics:

Medical journals and textbooks are clear that the only way to accurately determine the life-or-death impacts of medical treatments is by measuring “all-cause mortality” in “randomized controlled trials” (RCTS).
Clinical lingo aside, that measure is simply the number of deaths in studies where people are randomly assigned to receive or not receive a certain treatment, preferably with a placebo so that study participants don’t alter their mindsets or behaviors as a result of knowing whether or not they received the treatment.
Medical journals describe all-cause mortality in RCTs as “the most objective outcome” (Journal of Critical Care), “the most relevant outcome” (The Lancet Respiratory Medicine), “the most significant outcome” (JAMA Internal Medicine), and “the most important outcome” (PLoS Medicine, Journal of the National Medical Association, International Journal of Cardiology).
Data on all-cause mortality in RCTs was measured during the largest clinical trials for the Moderna and Pfizer Covid vaccines, which involved 72,663 people, half of whom were given vaccines and the other half placebos.
Among the 70,000+ trial participants, 37 died who received the vaccines, while 33 died who received the placebos.
The FDA buried those datapoints in a place and manner likely to be overlooked, and no major media outlet reported on them.
On a surface level, those data suggest that the vaccines increased the relative risk of death by 13%, but the absolute death rate in both groups was so small (0.1%) that the difference between them was statistically insignificant.
Accounting for sampling margins of error, the RCT data show with 95% confidence that the Covid vaccines didn’t decrease or increase the absolute risk of death by any more than 0.08% over the course of the trials.
Those facts were first published in a 2022 study conducted by Just Facts, with the results verified by a Ph.D. biostatistician and a Ph.D. computational biologist with postdoctorates in molecular biology and biochemistry.
The results of Just Facts’ study were also confirmed by a 2023 paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that used the same basic methodology as Just Facts and found that mRNA Covid vaccines “had no effect on overall mortality” with about the same margins of sampling error as Just Facts.
Those facts were further attested in 2024 when the European Journal of Clinical Investigation cited Just Facts’ study as evidence that “neither of the vaccines decreased or increased the absolute risk of death by more than 0.08%.”
While ignoring those gold standard studies, many politicians, media outlets, government agencies, corporations, and medical associations promoted Covid vaccine studies plagued by fatal flaws.
For example, more than 100 such entities publicized the results of a study from the Commonwealth Fund which estimated that C-19 vaccinations prevented about 279,000 deaths in the U.S. by the end of June 2021.
However, the study merely compared “observed” Covid-19 trends to a “model,” a type of study design that “rests upon a host of simplifying assumptions” and “cannot be fully” representative of the real world, as admitted by a medical journal that published a similar study.
Likewise, Google Gemini supports Bash’s statement by citing a study in the journal JAMA Health Forum as evidence that “COVID-19 vaccinations averted approximately 2.5 million deaths worldwide between 2020 and 2024.”
However, the study was an observational study, which can “rarely” determine the effects of a treatment due to confounding variables and other problems. Thus the authors of the study admit 3,000+ words into their paper that “analyses of VE [vaccine efficacy] based on observational data carry substantial uncertainty and bias.”
In the year before the C-19 pandemic began, the World Health Organization published a report stating that the key to sorting out studies is to rank the “quality of evidence” from strongest-to-weakest, with RCTs being the strongest followed by observational studies and then models (also called “simulation studies”).
The quality gaps between those types of studies are so great that WHO adopted a “general principle” to “not” even “review simulation studies” if observational studies were available and to “not review observational studies or simulation studies” if RCTs were available.
During the pandemic, the World Health Organization, the CDC, the FDA, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, politicians, the media, pharmaceutical executives, and big tech companies systematically violated WHO’s general principle by publicizing the weakest studies and ignoring the strongest, a pattern that Bash and Gemini continue.

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