> "hardly 0.1% of them might fall ill in any given year" is a very unrealistic assumption
It's very realistic. Because if a 100 million people fell ill in India, we would have classified it as a national health emergency and the World would start taking notice. You are talking about bubonic plague level proportions. That is a world-wide emergency. That's the reason I say your numbers are absolutely ridiculous.
Stop being so blinded by numbers that you forget the human element behind it. The realistic number is somewhere in the range of what I said. Let's be sensible when talking such things.
> is service is available (which is not universal in India at the moment, but is promised to be with this reform) the expected number of annual per capita doctors visits is at least 1 (OECD country average is 7, poorer countries get 1-2), not 0.001, a thousandfold difference
Doctor visit is not the same as being eligible for $7,200 worth of coverage. In India, doctor visits are generally free unless you are visiting a really high profile doctor. It's not the USA where even the visit requires you to deposit hundreds of dollars in consultation fees.
> Not all people won't get ill in a given year, but a large portion does; it depends on how severe illnesses you count but it's 30-60%, not 0.1% or 1%; and some people (much more than 0.1%) get multiple illnesses in a single year.
I already gave you figures. 0.7 million are cancer patients per year in India. Cancer is classified as a critical illness. The cost for it is approximately $7000 dollars. $7,200 dollars is more than sufficient to cover the expenses. So you are totally wrong here. I don't understand how you can say it's 30-60% when the national statistics I linked to say 0.7 million are cancer patients per year (which is 0.0538% of India's population). Don't throw numbers in the air without some facts backing your claims. Considering cancer is one of the major critical illnesses I extrapolated that number to around 3.25 million people with critical illness. That is almost 5 times the cancer number stats put out by reputed source (http://cancerindia.org.in/statistics/).
> I'm arguing that on average people (all 1.3 billion of them) need much, much more than $1 of coverage each year. You don't need $7200 to treat common diseases, but many of them will need more than $1. For every person that needs $0 of coverage there will be one that needs more than $2.
That's the reason I talked about specific critical illnesses like cancer/stroke etc. I guess you decided to skip that entirely.
> If the estimate was comparable to $10 per person (so, excluding private insurance, roughly $10 billion total not $1-2 billion), then it might be worth starting a discussion about the details and how much what costs. But $1/person/year is so ridiculous that it's off the charts.
Sorry to say but it's your argument that is ridiculous because it stems from the fact that $1/person/year is the coverage when it's not. No insurance company works that way in any part of the World. Seriously, learn how insurance works first.