In the words of Ronald Reagan, "There you go again."
It's how I feel every time I hear someone - whether it's Tom Daschle or one of my own columnists - talk about the number of uninsured in this country.
Now I know I wrote about this a few years back, but with the rise of the donkeys in D.C. (and the subsequent talk of health care reform), it's a topic that bears revisiting.
The thing that always bugs me is the lack of consistency. You can read 10 different stories about the uninsured in this country and come across 10 different estimates. The numbers vary wildly, from as low as 40 million to nearly 60 million, all of them instilling as much faith as the morning weather report. It's funny, when I was in journalism school, it was kind of a big deal to get the facts straight, and as much as we all hated numbers, we made doubly sure we had those right. It's no wonder daily newspapers are closing up faster than California subdivisions.
The other thing that gnaws at me is how we arrive at this motley mess of numbers. Quite simply, the Census Bureau asks respondents if they've been without insurance at any time over the past year, which is part of the reason we arrive at such a high number of so-called uninsured. Now this would naturally include anyone who simply changed jobs over the last year, which, of course, isn't at all representative.
Let me offer an example. By the Census Bureau's standard, nearly 20 percent of the California's residents lack health insurance, or around 7 million people. Yet, by simply changing the question (as the folks over at Pacific Research Institute did) and asking only about the previous month, that number dwindles down to 3 million residents, or around 7 percent.
A good analogy is unemployment, which is calculated monthly, and just jumped to a 26-year high of 8.9 percent. But we're to believe the number of uninsured hovers around twice that? I don't think so.
But don't take my word for it. The charts on this page, courtesy of Keith Hennessey (and on on his Web page) tell a much clearer story.
Denis Storey
Editor
dstorey@benefitssellingmag.com
From the June 2009 issue of Benefits Selling Magazine • Subscribe!
