Bloggers are interpreting the new Census Bureau numbers released yesterday. As Julie Rovner reports on NPR’s Health Blog, opponents and proponents of health reform each found something to bolster their arguments.
Shirley Wang of The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog looked more closely at the numbers and reports: “The middle income households appeared to be hit the hardest. The increase in uninsured came in those households with incomes of $50,000 to $74,999 a year. In all other income brackets, higher and lower, more people were covered by some type of insurance than in the previous year.”
Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag explains why President Obama used the number 30 million in his congressional health care address. After removing undocumented immigrants, Orszag explains, individuals eligible but not enrolled in public programs were also not included:
Some ambiguity surrounds how to treat individuals who are already eligible for public insurance programs like Medicaid and S-CHIP but do not enroll in those programs, which estimates from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured suggest may amount to millions of individuals. These individuals are uninsured but some interpretations would suggest they should not be counted among those who “cannot get” coverage. Subtracting them from the total would produce a number closer to 30 million. To be conservative, the President thus stated that “more than 30 million American citizens” cannot get coverage. (KHN is a program of the Foundation.)
But Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey parses the uninsured estimates, removing undocumented immigrants and those in households making more than $50,000 per year, and argues that fewer people than the total number of uninsured are significant in the health reform debate: “The general scope of the problem is between 17 and 20 million uninsured at worst, not 46 million or 30 million, as Obama tried to argue on Wednesday.”
Heritage’s Greg D’Angelo thinks an “important” trend in the Census Bureau numbers is often overlooked:
This year’s census numbers expose a troubling shift: government programs continue to gain ground while private insurance is on the decline. There are a variety of reasons for this change — including expansions of public programs, like Medicaid and SCHIP, and the early effects of the economic downturn (which cause people to lose their jobs based coverage).
But Harold Pollack on The New Republic’s The Treatment has a very different take: “I’m only relieved things weren’t worse. Things would have been worse but for one thing: continued expansion of government-provided health insurance coverage … As the costs of health care (and therefore coverage) continue to grow, our traditional employer-based system continues to unravel. Thank goodness government has been there to (at least partially) fill in the breach.”
Less passionatley, Politico’s Ben Smith also notices the increase of individuals covered by public programs and reprints some numbers from the Council of Economic Advisers’ Cecilia Rouse: “Since 2000, 5.9% of the population or more than 17.5 million people have left private insurance, while public plans — Medicaid, Medicare, and the state children’s health insurance programs — have taken in 13 million more.”
The New America Foundation’s Sarah Axeen takes a different look, focusing on who was most likely to be newly uninsured and realizes it hits close to home:
The new uninsureds were most likely to be:
- Members of a family unit
- Caucasian
- Between 45 and 64 years old
- People born in the United States
- From the West
- In or near large cities, particularly residing in smaller cites or suburbs
- Earning more than $75,000 a year
- Employed in part-time jobs
The takeaway for me from all of this new information is that the people who are most likely to be newly uninsured look eerily like my parents. People who have worked hard, had long careers, but whose employers can no longer afford to provide coverage or who can no longer afford to pay out of pocket for their care.
And Health Beat’s Naomi Freundlich points out that the Current Population Survey isn’t with a count of the uninsured:
Besides the national surveys, which by design are at least a year behind in determining how many Americans are uninsured, the health insurance industry does some estimates of their own. In fact, yesterday in an article in Bloomberg, an analyst from Sanford Bernstein & Co. who follows the large health insurers UnitedHealth and WellPoint said that the number of uninsured was likely to hit 50 million as unemployment jumped in recent months.
