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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Man the Panic Stations! It's "Cover the Uninsured Week"!

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (which I think invests in a lot of good work), has once again decided to arm the mob with pitchforks and torches for it's seventh annual "Cover the Uninsured Week."

This year's "scare-sheet" is called At the Brink: Trends in America's Uninsured - A State-By-State Analysis. It focusses on changes in the uninsured from the last period of health reform, HillaryCare, to today. Comparing the average number of uninsured from 1994/1995/1996 to 2006/2007, it concludes that 9 million more Americans are uninsured.

Ignored in the press release is the fact that, with population growth, the proportion of "uninsured" has only increased from 16% of the non-elderly population to 17.5%. In some states, it actually decreased. In Alabama, it dropped from 17.4% to 15.4%. (Whether this has anything to do with Alabama leading the Index of Health Ownership, I cannot directly determine, but I hope there's a connection!)

Even worse, the notion that 46 million uninsured is a meaningful number has been debunked in a number of places, including this book, a briefing paper on California's uninsured, and an analysis of the presidential campaign proposals in the 2008 election.

The media usually digests this stuff without even a burp, so imagine my pleasant surprise when the AP's Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar's lead sentence in his coverage of the report started like this: "American workers, whose taxes pay for massive government health programs, are getting squeezed like no other group....."!

This alone is impressive: The burden of taxation to fund out-of-control government-run health care programs is nowhere in the RWJF report! Mr. Alonso-Zaldivar had this as background knowledge.

Call me crazy, but this media coverage is change I can believe in!

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