$500 billion is the amount of money President Obama has cut out of the already insolvent Medicare program in order to finance the creation of Obamacare.

With the repeal and defunding of President Obama's healthcare law a big issue for the GOP, let us take a look at what $500 billion looks like in terms of both the taxation needed to generate it and what that kind of money translates into on the spending side.

$500 billion in taxes is the equivalent of taking $100 per person from 5 billion people(the world population is 6 billion).

At $10,000 per person 50 million people are necessary to pay for that $500 billion amount.

The left loves to talk about higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires so taking $100,000 per person would require that taxation rate on 5 million people.

By taking $1 million per person there would first have to be 500,000 people making that kind of money at which to levy that kind of tax.

And of course it would take 500 billionaires nationwide in order to come up with the $1 billion each to reach the $500 billion amount.  According to Forbes there are only 403 billionaires in the United States.

Now the Medicare program for which this $500 billion figure is derived is meant to be a healthcare program for the nations senior citizens.  As a 28 year old, non-smoking bachelor my yearly private health insurance comes out to $1200, at that rate we could buy 416 million people the same coverage I currently have(the population of the United States is 310 million).

For $12,000 you could pay for that $1200 plan for 10 years and cover 41 million people.

Seniors naturally have much higher medical cost than a young man such as myself  so for $120,000 a piece we could theoretically speaking cover over 4 million people for 10 years.

Since Medicare is currently structured the program reimburses doctors and hospitals for the care and treatment program beneficiaries use(and pay pennies on the dollar for that treatment buy the way, hence why more and more doctors are refusing to take Medicare patients).

So how does that reimbursement method work out, let us say that the average medical cost to treat a senior is $100,000, that means our $500 billion would help out 5 million people.

Up that average to $250,000 and 2 million people could be taken care of.

Or on the low end of the average scale $10,000 in reimbursements could help 50 million people.

At $50,000 for reimbursements 10 million people could be helped with that $500 billion in Medicare spending.

Now lets look back and compare, by using that $500 billion you can help out more people by way of private insurance plans than you can under the Medicare programs current structure.  Which is just one more way of looking at how the premium payment support system change for future Medicare recipients offered in congressman Paul Ryan's 2012 budget plan are actually a good thing for the 45 million people(and growing) on Medicare.

Two final tidbits of information for the fiscal year 2010 Federal budget Uncle Sam spent $519 billion on Medicare and each year Medicare/Medicaid have approximately $100 billion annually in waste, fraud and abuse.