There’s a lot of noise about the Census Bureau’s most recent report on income and health insurance coverage in America, but not much reasoned content. To see the full report, you can right click and down load this link. It is a 3MB PDF file.

Captain Ed interviews Robert Rector on the definition of “poor” in the report, and Rector’s analysis at the Heritage Foundation site is illuminating indeed. And the Professor at Back Talk has good information on both the income and health insurance numbers. These are fair representations of the data from right and left.

But other liberal blogs are lamenting huge numbers of uninsured referenced by the Census Bureau: The Liberal Doomslayer claims its a “calamity”, while Politics Plus warns that “vigorous action is needed to reverse this alarming and intractable trend”.

But wait, let’s take a look at that report, and not just the headline stat:

Research shows health insurance coverage is underreported in the CPS ASEC for a variety of reasons. Annual retrospective questions appear to cause few problems when collecting income data (possibly because the interview period is close to when people pay their taxes). However, because health insurance coverage status can change over the course of a year, answering questions about this long reference period may lead to response errors.

The report itself mentions that the data is unreliable.

Unreliability of the data aside, some interesting facts emerge as you look at the numbers we’ve been given. Something between 20% and 45% of the uninsured are non-citizens, either illegal aliens, visitors or legal immigrants who do not have insurance (John Stossel – cited below, provides the 20% number in advance of the report based on prior reports, and the AEI provided the 45% estimate based on their first pass at the report Tuesday, 8/28/2006).

These are “transitory uninsured”, and no country I know of provides medical insurance for illegal immigrants or people in the country on work visas. Do we want a government aid program for non-citizens?

Others are in demographic groups where not having insurance is a viable financial choice (18 – 25 year olds, comprising about 20% of the uninsured). As my younger employees sometimes say to me, they are healthy, have fewer possessions to protect from that “poverty inducing accident”, and besides, if they did have a health crisis that cost that much, it would trigger public aid anyway. They aren’t thinking of losing their house, 401k and pension fund to health care costs. They don’t have that much to lose, the chance of them having a serious illness is small. And they seem to have a feeling of invincibility. (Oh, to be young again …)

A large percentage of the uninsured are from households earning more than $50,000 a year (37%), with about 19% of the total 45 million earning over $75,000 a year. Liberal blogs, such as The Mahablog, claim this is evidence of the crisis “creeping into the middle class”. I think something else is at work here.

I am in favor of young workers choosing to buy health insurance rather than MP3s for their iPods, but I’m not in favor of forcing them to buy it. As John Stossel notes in his report a few days ago about the WHO dissing of American health care:

Even with these interventions, the 45 million figure is misleading. Thirty-seven percent of that group live in households making more than $50,000 a year, says the U.S. Census Bureau. Nineteen percent are in households making more than $75,000 a year; 20 percent are not citizens, and 33 percent are eligible for existing government programs but are not enrolled.

At the end of the calculations, you get to around 8 million people who may not have had health insurance in the prior year. And even then, the official report reminds us yet again, in Appendix C:

Compared with other national surveys, the CPS estimate of the number of people without health insurance more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point in time during the year than the number of people uninsured for the entire year. For a comparison of health insurance coverage rates from the major federal surveys, see How Many People Lack Insurance and for How Long? (Congressional Budget Office, May 2003).

Health care is an issue, but not a “crisis”. I would much rather quit paying for ‘all inclusive’ group coverage that offers me psychological care, additiction treatment, acupuncture, alternative massage and aroma therapy … as required by regulations in some states … and pay a lesser premium for catastrophic incident coverage.