The uninsured and lying with statistics
June 29th, 2009 | by Brian Schwartz |
David Harsanyi has another great column in the Denver Post, this time how many people in the U.S. are uninsured. Some excerpts:
Did you know that about 300 million Americans went without food, water and shelter at some point last year?
I am a survivor.
If you were blessed with the prodigiously creative and cunning mind of a politician, that kind of statistic — meaningless but technically true — could be put to good use.
In the entertaining 1954 classic “How To Lie With Statistics,” Darrell Huff writes, “Misinforming people by the use of statistical material might be called statistical manipulation… (or) statisticulation.”
One of the most persistent examples of modern-day statisticulation is the sufficiently true claim that 46 million (it becomes 50 million when senators really get keyed up) Americans don’t have health insurance.
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It is true that the 46 million figure is based on unreliable Census Bureau data. But even the less unreliable Congressional Budget Office puts the number at about 31 million. And even that number, former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin claims, is an “incomplete and potentially misleading picture of the uninsured population.”
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In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research called “Is Health Insurance Affordable for the Uninsured?,” [summary] Stanford economists say, “Based on a plausible range of definitions and assumptions health insurance is affordable for between one quarter and three quarters of adults who are not insured.”
Turns out that 8.4 million uninsured Americans are making $50,000 to $74,999, and 9.1 million more are making more than $75,000. Health insurance is just incompatible with their lifestyles, I guess.
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These facts do not undermine the argument for nationalized health care. (History and common sense do that already.) They do, however, point out that many statistics, to quote Huff again, get by “only because the magic of numbers brings about a suspension of common sense.”
Read the whole article here.
tags: uninsured
