Like many who work in health care (and some who don't), I am watching the discussions/debates/proposals/revised proposals on health care reform with much interest. One of the things that has intrigued me is the ease with which incredibly large dollar amounts are communicated. I mean when did "trillion dollars" sneak so comfortably into our vocabulary? I remember when I was a little girl (which I admit was a really long time ago), "million" was more a concept than an amount as it seemed so far out of any normal person's grasp. I remember vividly that if someone had a million dollars, they would never have to work again. Winning a million dollars would have set you on that street called Easy. I know lots of people who don't bother to play the lottery if the pot is not lots and lots of millions -- not that I am encouraging people to gamble, it is just something that I have observed. I have asked my family and friends who only buy tickets when the lottery pot gets to that over $100 million mark, "Why don't you play when you could win $2 million?" The general answer is "It's just not as much fun to dream about what I could do with $2 million. Now, $200 million, I'm on Easy Street."
I understand inflation and that a dollar is not what it used to be. Is that why we have moved so comfortably from talking about millions to billions to trillions? Is it because the television news anchors say it with such ease? Even though I am pretty horrible at math, I am fascinated by numbers. (As an aside, I thought July 8 was very cool because the date was 7-8-9. And yesterday (July 16), if you added the month and the year, the sum was the day). So, for the first time ever, I numerically wrote 1 trillion. It doesn't just easily roll off the pen and required me to go back and count more than once to make sure I had included the right number of zeroes. I think if we took the time to write numbers out (sorry AP Style Guide) or to imagine what a trillion of anything would look like (would a trillion baseballs fill a stadium?), we might have a deeper appreciation for what these numbers mean. This is not a political statement, just one woman's observation.
