The number of Americans without health insurance, the ‘uninsured,’ is inflated.

The Wall Street Journal finally looks into how many American citizens actually don’t have health insurance and are permanently uninsured..

There are far fewer uninsured than politicians say there are.

There are approximately 6 million to 8 million uninsured Americans, not 47.5 million.

President Obama and Congress are trying to fix health insurance markets for 6 to 8 million folks by further distorting health care and health insurance markets for people who pay taxes and their monthly health insurance premiums. It makes no sense.

Impact graphs from wsj.com:

The Census Bureau estimates that the number of uninsured amounts to 45.7 million people. But the agency might be overcounting by millions due to faulty assumptions. Another problem: That 45.7 million figure includes undocumented immigrants, even though they aren’t likely to be covered under new laws.

But that hasn’t stopped both parties in Congress from using the flawed numbers liberally, as they debate health-care overhaul this summer. That’s a reprise of what happened 15 years ago, when the Clinton health plan foundered under differing cost estimates wielded by opponents. But such projections are even more uncertain than today’s fuzzy count of the uninsured, depending on tricky assumptions about people’s economic choices.

“There is a range of uncertainty in health legislation that probably exceeds that of most other issues before Congress,” says Robert D. Reischauer, who headed the Congressional Budget Office when it was analyzing the Clinton health plan.

 

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

<< Back to main