Why can’t we add a fee to lottery tickets nationwide to cover medical insurance?
Question by brett h: Why can’t we add a fee to lottery tickets nationwide to cover medical insurance?
A simple solution is to add a $ 1.00 charge to all lottery tickets sold nationwide. Most of the individuals that purchase lottery tickets either have the money to buy the ticket and are well off, or do not have any money nor insurance. This charge could be used to pay for medical expenses in each state where the lottery tickets were purchased to cover hospital/doctor costs for those without insurance.
Best answer:
Answer by Casey Y
The lottery is already a poor tax (higher percentage of income paid by people with extremely low income), this would only make it worse.
Adding $ 1.00 to every lottery ticket would decrease sales and still wouldn’t be nearly enough to cover the health care costs of the nation.
Why not just increase income tax, sales tax, and property tax? That way, everyone pays, not just lottery players.
We have enough taxes as it is. There’s no need to create new taxes, just adjust the ones we have.
(a) You are not correct about who buys lottery tickets — the poor and lower middle class buy them more often than any other group. In general, the higher your income and more education you have, the less frequently you buy lottery tickets of any kind.
(b) Price matters. $ 2 tickets sell less than $ 1 tickets. $ 10 tickets sell a lot less than $ 5 tickets. Increase the price, decrease the sales (when you do it across the board).
(c) current lottery sales are depressed across the board because of the economy. Again, because they are extremely dependent upon the poorest economically. They can’t meet their current promise to education.
(b) Even if none of this (above) was true, $ 1 per ticket wouldn’t be enough to cover nationalized insurance for just a couple of big states, let alone all of them. The state lottery systems sell billions; but not nearly enough to cover health care.
That $ 1 would not cover the cost of medical insurance and you will have people who buy lottery tickets paying for those who dont buy them.
In California the lottery law passed only because officials said the money would go for schools. Well that was a lot of malarkey because it never happened. The money went to administrative salaries.
Even if you sold exactly the same number of lottery tickets (which you wouldn’t at twice the price), you wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface. A simpler solution would be to have people that don’t qualify for Welfare buy health insurance.
Yeah, do the math on that.
We have approximately 45,000,000 people uninsured here in the USA. There are approximately 146,000,000 lottery tickets sold in the USA, per year. On average, each person in the USA buys slightly over $ 8,000 in medical care, per year.
In order for the tax on lottery tickets to be enough to pay uninsured peoples’ medical claims, the tax would have to be $ 2,465.75 PER TICKET.
PS, the lottery is basically a tax on people who are bad at math. People who are GOOD at math, and money, don’t buy lottery tickets.