The uninsured

From the Obama rhetoric it is easy to envisage 48 million people dying at home, because they have no health insurance, and because the old die and are not in work to pay insurance we assume that most are old.

There is an article today on The Adam Smith Institute site by Steve Bettison which corrects this. He uses data from the US Census Office, but because of the number of citizens we are still awaiting the 2008 survey, so it is anyone's guess what the exact current situation as a result of the recession.

About 47 million, or 15% of the total population were uninsured.

Of these approaching 10 million were people who were not US citizens but foreigners.
A further 32 million were in households earning at least $25,000 (of whom over 9 million were earning over $75,000) $25,000 should have enabled sufficient insurance.

So we are looking at perhaps 4 million actual US citizens who were not earning sufficient income to take out insurance, at most 1.5 % of the population.

In age terms there were 686,000 over the age of 65 who were uninsured. There were also over 18 million aged 18-34, who could expect to be at low risk of illness and therefore choose not to take out insurance.

So our assumption that it is mostly the unwaged elderly who are insured, is not really accurate. The picture is much more complex, and to talk of 46 million for whom "we must make arrangements" could be very misleading.