From the rightwing blog, Get Liberty, comes this little bit of wisdom and funky arithmetic:
According the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 report, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” 46.9 million people are uninsured in the U.S. There’s only one problem with this statistic: approximately 31.85 million of them do not actually exist.
The numbers really cannot lie, although the report does. Out of a total population of 297.05 million, the report states on Page 20 that the “number of people covered by private insurance was… 201.7 million in 2006” and the “number of people covered by government health programs was… 80.3 million in 2006.”
Therefore, 282 million had insurance. Which means that out of a total population of 297.05 million, 15.05 million did not have insurance. Right?
Not at the U.S. Census Bureau. There, 297.05 million minus 282 million equals 46.9 million Americans uninsured. How?
Well, call it “fuzzy math.” In the above figure, taken from Page 20 of Census’ report, the fine print reads, “The estimates by type of coverage are not mutually exclusive; people can be covered by more than one type of insurance during the year.” But, nobody can be covered by insurance and not covered by it.
In other words, some 31.85 million people reported as uninsured in 2006 did have some coverage, and the Census included them in both categories. Why? They were probably between jobs at some point during the year, which is not abnormal.
I debated whether I should comment on this, but it was so over-the-top disingenuous and has the potential to leak into mainstream arguments about health care that I thought it best to offer some commentary. It is an interesting way to look at the report, I guess, if you don’t mind ignoring what the numbers actually say.
Basically, the Census data shows about 47 million uninsured and and 250 million insured. The discrepency comes from the overlap — almost 32 million people were covered both by private and government plans, possibly at different times during the year.
This is what Robert Romano, the author of the blog post, is referring to above. He acknowledges what is happening, but then decides he has a better way of looking at the numbers than the report’s authors.
Again, I would have ignored this but disinformation has been the driving force for much of the healthcare debate, especially among those opposed to a public option (witness the public relations blitz trying to scare seniors into thinking the government wants them dead, or the attacks on public-run care that ignore Medicare and the VA).
If we don’t counter this kind of nonsense, it just floats out there into the mainstream.
