Up late last night to watch the Clinton speech, so not enough sleep. Adrenaline should work during class. Election day today – I will ask (anonymously) how many know that, and how many will vote. As for real QR – I’ll do the health care for the uninsured problem from Chapter1
Here are the results of the election day poll:
- 11 students knew it was election day. 10 did not.
- 5 voted or would vote, 3 more might (three of those 8 were among those who didn’t know it was election day). Among the nonvoters, 4 had good reasons (they weren’t residents). I didn’t count “my vote wouldn’t matter” as a good reason.
Reviewed/restated the annual retail food cost estimation from last class, using units:
500 billion dollars
————————–
person
——————————————————-
year
– can’t format that nicely on the blog, but don’t want to write
(500 billion dollars / person ) / year
That gave me a head start on next week (next chapter) on units.
[Long interruption to answer linear algebra questions. I’ll do what I can now before I go to teach that class.]
The rest of the class (almost an hour) we spent understanding what you can infer from the $43 billion annual medical costs for the uninsured – amounting to $1000 extra premium for each insured family. We managed the first part, after a while: it’s about $150 per person per year. It took a while to read the question carefully enough to see that the denominator was (total US population) not (number of uninsured) – that was the next question. A nice unplanned conclusion from this one was to compare that $150 to the food cost. Turns out to be about 7%, which is really substantial. All done cheerfully with curly arithmetic.
Google told us there are about 60 million uninsured – 20% of the population. The $43 billion comes out to about $1,000 per person, which is a believable average. Many people have almost no expenses but a few have enormous expenses – so I was able to promise we’d talk about weitghted averages some day …
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