re: #145 lincolntf

I’m looking forward to “Wee-Wee’s Big Plea” tonight.
Things I’ll be looking for are his use of the fictional “40+ million Americans without insurance”

It isn’t fictional. The real estimate is about 36 million.

Getting back to Obama’s statement, he said, “Nearly 46 million Americans don’t have health insurance coverage today.” That is the most recent number for the U.S. Census available, but he messes it up in one way that would tend to overcount the uninsured and in another way that would tend to undercount them.

It’s an overcount because it counts noncitizens. Take out the 9.7 million noncitizens and the actual number is closer to 36 million.

It’s an undercount because it’s old data from when the economy was doing much better, and it was for people who were uninsured for a whole year. If you wanted to look at numbers just for “today,” the number would likely be higher, but by how much we can’t say. (The Department of Health and Human Services survey found that there were 57.7 million uninsured at some point during the first half of 2008, but we couldn’t find a breakout for noncitizens.)

So Obama is sloppy by saying it is for “Americans” but not accounting for the noncitizens, which leaves him off by about 22 percent. Yet it’s likely his error is counterbalanced to some extent by the large number of people who have lost insurance during the recession. So we rate his statement Mostly True.

There’s also a further issue about how many are underinsured.