Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Who are the Uninsured?

Today the Democrats revealed more details on how they wanted to cover the almost "50 Million Americans who don't have health coverage". Most of the proposals include some pretty scary taxes. I thought this would be a great time to look at some of the numbers behind the "50 Million uninsured" that you and I may have to pay for.


There is a site I have started playing with called Spreety TV Online : Watch TV Shows Online Free. Spreety has links to a number of different political websites and has clips of many of the shows on those sites for free. There are links to Fox News, CNN, and an assortment of other news or current events shows. I used Spreety to find the Fact Check. org site. Fact Check has a very interesting summary of the people we could be taxed to buy health insurance for.


First, according to Fact Check, the number of uninsured is estimated at 45.7 million, not 50 million. That number is constantly moving because people are constantly getting, loosing, or changing their insurance. There is not a static block of 45.7 million people in the United States without insurance. According to Fact Check:

-- 26 % of the uninsured (roughly 11.8 Million) are eligible for insurance, but don't make use of it.

-- 21 % of the uninsured (roughly 9.6 Million) are uninsured immigrants. This includes both legal and illegal immigrants. It is difficult to estimate what percentage of the 9.6 Million are illegal.

--40% of the uninsured (roughly 18.3 Million) are young. The term young as used by Fact Check means between the ages of 18 and 34.

There are a number of new questions that open up with these numbers. For example, regardless of the percentage, should families in this economy be taxed to provide government health care for illegal immigrants? Should people between the ages of 18 to 34 who don't want insurance (whatever portion of the 18.3 Million that is) be forced to buy health insurance? These questions and others need to be examined in the debate on Government provided health care.

If we are going to treat this subject with the respect it deserves, it will take time to answer these questions. If Congress and the President rush to solve this, it won't be right, it will waste money, and it still won't cover all of the 45.7 Million uninsured.




This post sponsored by Spreety TV Online!

6 comments:

the anonymous guy said...

Got advice on heath insurance? Say it to their face.

Andy D said...

I wouldn't change any of my opinions on Obama's health plan just because I was talking to someone who went through medical bankruptcy.

the anonymous guy said...

That's it Andy. Don't let reality intrude on your opinions.

Reality certainly isn't about to intrude on the base of your party. Y'all are gettin' kinda crazy. Everything ok?

Andy D said...

Hmmmm...The first clip doesn't really have anything to do with this topic, and I am not sure you really listened to the second clip.

It has nothing to do with preventing reality from intruding on my views. It has everything to do with being secure enough in my opinions to discuss them with anyone out there. If someone is in a medical bankruptcy, I feel for them, and I would never want to go through that, but why would we change our entire health care system to protect one specific individual? Why do you want to ration the health care of every taxpayer to prevent a few from going into medical bankruptcy?

And if you are really concerned with medical bankruptcy, how do you think the huge government mandates and taxes are going to affect business? They will drive businesses into bankruptcy, they will cause more families to loose their jobs. How does making more people poor, making more people jobless and bankrupt help those who are already in a bad situation?

the anonymous guy said...

Many businesses are asking the U.S. government to get serious about universal health care, because they can't afford to pay for it.

And, oh, I listened to that second clip. That's your boy, as you've written on here. He's great. He's listening. He's all about reality. You're in good company, in both of those clips. The proud G.O.P., bravely doing battle with reality.

And what's with your weird claim about "one" American facing medical bankruptcy? It's 2 million a year, dude. And 5 million Americans have lost their health insurance since September 2008.

But, hey, as long as you've got Beck screaming in your ears, maybe you can block all of that out.

Andy D said...

There are other ways to solve the health insurance problems than by creating a national health insurance. Look at some of the other solutions Pack and I discussed here.

I don't mean that there is one person going through medical bankruptcy. What I mean is compared to the population of the United States, the number of people going through medical bankruptcy is small. Why would we destroy our economy for something that won't help their situation?

Rush Limbaugh suggested a national catastrophic health care system yesterday. If we were going to go to a nationalized system, I could potentially support that provided it was coupled with more freedom for people to choose health insurance that they wanted, or to not buy health insurance at all.