In 1720 calculus inventor Isaac Newton lost a fortune in a stock market crash that he had personally predicted. Mark Twain lost a fortune investing in an automatic typesetting machine. Dozens of entertainers and sports stars have at some point filed bankruptcy, including Randy Quaid, Jerry Lewis, Grace Jones, Kim Bassinger, Walt Disney, and Mickey Rooney, who did it twice.
These are not stupid people. But the list doesn't include the 50% of Americans who file bankruptcy because of medical bills.
McKinsey & Co. estimates that by 2015 consumers will be paying $420 billion for medical expenses out of their pockets, not including insurance premiums.
Maybe it's time for us to learn from Isaac Newton by doing some calculus to get us out of this mess.
Showing posts with label Jerry Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jerry Lewis. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Raising all that money for Muscular Dystrophy raises a burning question
Yesterday at his annual Labor Day Telethon broadcast on 190 stations, Jerry Lewis raised nearly $64 million to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The IAFF or International Association of Fire Fighters contributed 40% of the total. In 42 years Lewis has raised over $1.4 billion dollars to fight MD. The annual Telethon accounts for about a quarter of MDA’s net income.
Muscular Dystrophy is actually an umbrella term for some forty-odd neuromuscular diseases. All that money: Must be a lot of people with MD. Actually approximately one in 4,000 newborns gets the disease, which means that 80,000 babies get MD each year in the US.
Another statistic from the National Center for Health Statistics says that around 1,200 people die annually from MD.
MD has no cure so these two statistics do not add up. You can’t have 80,000 babies getting MD and only 1,200 dying from it. Some possibilities are that MD victims leave the US before they die, death statistics are underreported, or birth statistics are overreported. I’ll have to ask Jerry Lewis about this, maybe he knows.
It turns out that burn injuries are second only to motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in the US. According to the Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation, 2.4 million burn injuries are reported each year and one million will sustain substantial or permanent disabilities resulting from their burn injury. That’s twelve times the number of babies getting MD.
The International Association of Fire Fighters has incredible power to raise money. Think what they could do for burn victims.
It’s too bad George Burns isn’t around anymore. With that cigar of his he’d be the perfect host for a telethon.
Muscular Dystrophy is actually an umbrella term for some forty-odd neuromuscular diseases. All that money: Must be a lot of people with MD. Actually approximately one in 4,000 newborns gets the disease, which means that 80,000 babies get MD each year in the US.
Another statistic from the National Center for Health Statistics says that around 1,200 people die annually from MD.
MD has no cure so these two statistics do not add up. You can’t have 80,000 babies getting MD and only 1,200 dying from it. Some possibilities are that MD victims leave the US before they die, death statistics are underreported, or birth statistics are overreported. I’ll have to ask Jerry Lewis about this, maybe he knows.
It turns out that burn injuries are second only to motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in the US. According to the Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation, 2.4 million burn injuries are reported each year and one million will sustain substantial or permanent disabilities resulting from their burn injury. That’s twelve times the number of babies getting MD.
The International Association of Fire Fighters has incredible power to raise money. Think what they could do for burn victims.
It’s too bad George Burns isn’t around anymore. With that cigar of his he’d be the perfect host for a telethon.
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