When Is 45 Million Not 45 Million?

Been gone a while -- my day job keeps getting in the way of new posts. (Winter: the busy season for a doctor. Who'd've thunk it?)

Hat tip to Laura at Pursuing Holiness for putting me on to this video. It's worth the nine or so minutes of your time. (One of these days I'm going to figure out how to embed or link YouTube videos into my blog. I just can't seem to get it to work. Follow the link or the rest of this post won't make much sense.)

Don't try to add up the numbers in this video without making some adjustments. Otherwise, you'll come up with 78 million uninsured. The quoted numbers for the "young invincibles", >75K and >50K incomes, the government-program eligibles who fail to apply, and even likely the illegal aliens must have some overlap built into them. I have seen other statistics quoted in the American Medical News (the AMA's newspaper) that agree with the bottom line of 6-8 million hard-core uninsured -- those who simply cannot afford, cannot get [due to pre-existing conditions], or are not functional enough to obtain insurance on their own.

The video is enlightening, and infuriating, mostly due to the quotes from the interviewees. The worst offender is the young woman we are introduced to at the beginning of the clip. I'll call her Ms Freeloader. Why? She can't recall how much her hospital bill was after being hit by a car on her bicycle as she "didn't bother to pay for it" -- most likely because she thinks "it's ridiculous that you have to pay for basic health care in this country". Being hit by a car is "basic health care"? Since when? And what about the driver's auto liability insurance? All of the interview subjects admit to spending large amounts of their income on dining out and entertainment, with nary a care about what's going to happen to them when their health luck runs out; the reason they're referred to as "invincibles" is because in their own minds they are healthy and this isn't going to change so why do they need insurance? Though I'll bet they insure their car or motorcycle or wave-runner or whatever.

Then there's the policy analyst. If his figure is correct, that the system spends an average of $1000/yr for every one of these uninsured individuals, then that means the system is taking on $45 billion per year in non-reimbursed care. This $45 billion is either absorbed by the system -- that means written off as uncollectable by hospitals and doctors (who alone among all businesses cannot legally deduct that loss from their taxes) -- or is passed on to the responsible people who pay their bills in the form of higher healthcare costs. A certain small portion is covered in whole or in part by governmental programs. Very little of this cost is paid by the health insurance industry, which goes out of its way to try not to pay that which they actually owe, much less what isn't properly their responsibility. $37 billion of this is for people who for whatever reason have chosen to shirk their responsibilities. If that does bring your blood to a rolling boil, then consider the compassionate entry program, where foreign nationals are brought into this country to receive uncompensated care that adds to our tab even more. My blood transitioned completely to the vapor state long ago, so this merely increases the pressure in my steam-powered circulatory system.

So let's consider some numbers. If we accept the 45 million figure as the uninsured, with an American population of 300 million, that means there is a 15% uninsured rate. If the number is only 8 million, the rate is only 2.7% Since the American population is actually almost 306 million as of this posting, those rates are really 14.7% and 2.6%. With the current economic collapse and increasing unemployment, I'll accept that these numbers are the lower end of the estimate and that the real numbers are actually higher, but it's hard to pin them down as the unemployment rate is still fluctuating.

For a problem that is costing us $45 billion max (mostly because of the shirkers), with an underlying core of 2.7% truly uninsured individuals, we are now being asked by the new 'enlightened' Administration to pony up hundreds of billions of dollars to 'reform' the healthcare system. At last count this includes $643 billion in the 2010 budget, with more to follow in 2011 and beyond, as well as untold billions in the so-called stimulus spending bill (I haven't seen a solid number for how much in that bill is for "healthcare", if you consider creating a national healthcare network healthcare, which I don't). Once again the numbers don't add up, but this time it's because the money isn't really going to "healthcare".

This 45 million (and climbing!) figure that we've been hammered with for all these years is just a bunch of smoke and mirrors, part of the (Democrat/Liberal) plot to seize more power and control over you by taking more control over more and more of your life. And like lambs being led to the slaughterhouse, most of the American people don't see what's coming. It won't be pretty. But then, slaughterhouses rarely are.