Friday, August 07, 2009

The Fuzzy Math of 47 Million

The Fuzzy Math of 47 Million
: "According the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 report, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” 46.9 million people are uninsured in the U.S. There’s only one problem with this statistic: approximately 31.85 million of them do not actually exist.
The numbers really cannot lie, although the report does. Out of a total population of 297.05 million, the report states on Page 20 that the “number of people covered by private insurance was… 201.7 million in 2006” and the “number of people covered by government health programs was… 80.3 million in 2006.”
Therefore, 282 million had insurance.
Which means that out of a total population of 297.05 million, 15.05 million did not have insurance.
Right?"

1 comment:

Buckley said...

Wrong. As page 20 states people can have more than one type of health insurance. In fact, many people on medicare also buy private insurance. But netrootsnation subtracts them from the total twice, coming up with an err fuzzy number.

Note page 20 says:

“The estimates by type of coverage are not mutually exclusive; people can be covered by more than one type of insurance during the year.”