1% of 11 billion is $110 million.

To go from a million to a billion, you multiply by 1000.

Same to go from 1 to one thousand or one thousand to one million. It’s also easy to remember since the commas are every 3 decimal places.

1/1000 is equivalent to 0.1%, not 1%.

Indeed, a typo, my apologies.

The point that it is a LOT less than 2 billion stands however

Your math is bad. 1% of recipients is nowhere near the same as the 1% of smokers you used.

It’s assuming the 1% of smokers who are recipients are evenly distributed (statistically speaking) across the smoking population. A quite reasonable assumption.

Therefore, to generally reduce the population of recipients you’d have to reduce the population of smokers.

Unless you have data showing a specific population skew or sampling issue I’d say it is perfectly good math, albeit with an assumption.

Now, of course, you could simply deny service to 1% of smokers who would be recipients—or other extremely skewed sampling attacks—but that is somewhat unlikely and in most cases directly against the goals of the program.