Why is it that liberals always manage to the exception? The state of Minnesota just sunk millions of dollars into changing the names of the Lindbergh and Humphrey terminals at MSP airport into "Terminal 1" and "Terminal 2" because an annual average of 20,000 travelers are confused by the names. That seems significant until one factors in that about 6 million people file through the airport yearly. That's a third of a percent!
Sorry, off-topic rant. Anyway, the 45 million uninsured number. The American Spectator breaks it down (note: They used the 46 million total):
- 9.7 million are not U.S. citizens.
- 14 million are estimated to be eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP but are not currently enrolled.
- In 2007, 17.6 million of the uninsured had annual incomes of more than $50,000 and 9.1 million earned more than $75,000.
- According to the last census, 18.3 million were under 34.
- When Blue Cross Blue Shield conducted a study in 2003, they found about 8.3 million people who were too poor to purchase insurance and too rich to qualify for health insurance.
First, they selected 33,994 individuals whom had participated in the previous NHANES III study from 1986 -1994. They excluded people 65 years and older, so the sample was 14,798 people between the ages of 17 and 64. Then they excluded Medicaid and VA beneficiaries. Sample size now 12775. Six hundred sixty-three lacked information on the health insurance, and 974 had private insurance or failed to complete a physical examination or the interview process for the study. OK, sample size now 11,138. Including only "complete baseline data" from both interview and physical analysis, they ended up with 9,004 study subjects, or three-millionths of the population.
Then what did they do? They followed up with the subjects in 2000 and found 351 had died. That was the extent of follow-up. The study admits that "We were unable to measure the effect of gaining or losing coverage after the interview. Point-in-time uninsurance is associated with subsequent uninsurance." In other words, they ASSUMED that, hypothetically, if a subject didn't have insurance at the time of their interview, went to a job with full benefits the next day, and had the job and health insurance till the day he or she was hit by a bus the day before the follow-up, he or she would be counted among the uninsured! The study's author offers this to detract from the gaping hole in the study's methodology: "Intermittent insurance coverage is common and accelerates the decline among middle-aged persons." I looked up the footnote and read the abstract from the Journal of the American Medical Association. Funny the conclusion that study drew wasn't quite the same drawn by the self-serving 2009 Harvard study. The JAMA abstract concluded that previously intermittently or persistently uninsured people, particularly those with cardiovascular disease or diabetes, upon obtaining access to Medicare, trended toward an improvement in self-reported health.
The Harvard study concludes with a "fact" that doesn't seem to be derived from the data of the study, but from a chart derived from undated CDC and Census data, showing insurance rates, by state, deaths in that state, and the "excess deaths" for each state. According to the CDC, an excess death is defined as "the difference between the number of deaths observed in a racial/ethnic group and the number of deaths that would have occurred in that group if it had the same death rate as the non-Hispanic white population."
In one stroke, CDC data, itself very subjective, is interpreted to represent deaths due to lack of health insurance. What???
The news media is simply not doing its job when "journalists" pass along these "facts" without a skeptical eye and the willingness to just do a little digging. Just a little. It took me an hour to put this information together.
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