Wrap this message around a brick and toss over the White House fence: Uninsured not at 47 million
No tags for this post.HOT AIR
Exactly a month ago, Michael Ramirez presented this data in an excellent editorial cartoon, but the news media didn’t pay attention. AEI covered the same ground in its August 2008 edition of The American, and the national media still hasn’t caught up. Unfortunately, they will probably not pay much attention to Jazz Shaw, Cato Institute, or Hot Air and Ed Morrissey either when we point out that the number of uninsured Americans is dramatically lower than the 47 million figure bandied about in the debate.
Do you think they’d listen to the Census Bureau? Jazz writes:
Next, we need to go back to the Census Bureau report and turn to page 31 where we are informed that their total number includes the category of those who are listed as “non-citizens” (which are carefully broken out from naturalized citizens vs. native born citizens.) The non-citizen rate of uninsured individuals clocked in at 43.8%, or roughly 9.4 million non-Americans. Since these people are not here legally and not paying into the system, that portion of the crisis is better addressed in a debate on immigration issues, but taxpaying Americans don’t need to be on the hook for that segment of the total.
While the number continues to drop, it’s also worth noting that we’re not talking exclusively about the abject poor who can’t afford insurance. As this Business and Media report informs us, that same Census Bureau summary includes the following:
But according to the same Census report, there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.
Once you do some fairly basic math, you come up with the same figure that the Kaiser Family Foundation arrived at.
The liberal Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of uninsured Americans who don’t qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million.
