According to the Census Bureau, of the 46 million Americans who are uninsured: 10.1 million are individuals who have income of $66,000 for a family of four, but who elect to remain uninsured. 9.3 million are non-citizens who generally do not pay tax. 6.4 million who are enrolled in Medicaid or S-CHIP but reported to the Census taker that they were not. (This phenomenon is known among statisticians as the Medicaid undercount.) 4.3 million are eligible for Medicaid or S-CHIP but have not enrolled. 5 million are childless adults, mainly healthy, young adults who simply do not wish to pay for insurance.
So you constantly hype and support Obama's healthcare policy but you aren't aware of these statistics? No wonder people here constantly trash you... Twenty-six percent of the uninsured are eligible for some form of public coverage but do not make use of it, according to The National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation. This is sometimes, but not always, a matter of choice. Twenty-one percent of the uninsured are immigrants, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But that figure includes both those who are here legally and those who are not. The number of illegal immigrants who are included in the official statistics is unknown. Twenty percent of the uninsured have family incomes of greater than $75,000 per year, according to the Census Bureau. But this does not necessarily mean they have access to insurance. Even higher-income jobs donât always offer employer-sponsored insurance, and not everyone who wants private insurance is able to get it. Forty percent of the uninsured are young, according to KFF. But speculation that they pass up insurance because of their good health is unjustified. KFF reports that many young people lack insurance because itâs not available to them, and people who turn down available insurance tend to be in worse health, not better, according to the Institute of Medicine. http://www.factcheck.org/2009/06/the-real-uninsured/
It's not the 46 million that Obama is concerned with, it's the other 254 million that he wants control of.
This issue is like the death penalty issue, only reversed. The liberals call for its abolishment until their parents are hacked to pieces by some lunatic who was already convicted of murder but served 24 years and got out. Similarly, hysterical Obama haters make claims like this, simply because they haven't personally known anyone who paid for health insurance only to find out that when they got sick, the insurance company told them to go fuck themselves. How many times do we have to hear about the insurance companies' fraudulent practices, like making sure every claimant is first told 'your claim is rejected' simply because they know that xx% of people won't know what to do and will just drop it? How many times do we have to hear that young person died because his insurers determined that his leukemia was a 'pre-existing condition'? The big question is this. Everyone and their dog knows that a private corporation can outperform the government in any business. What is it that the insurance companies are so afraid of? Let them have some competition. Hmmm... let's see. How many of the Western industrialized democracies have some form of 'public option'? Oh yes, that's right. All of them. Is it all? Or nearly all? Hmmm... let's see. In a civilized country, citizens should have the right to walk around with loaded automatic weapons but should not expect that if they contract a deadly disease, the government to which they pay their exorbitant taxes will at least help them fight for their health. The most laughable argument is that 'there's nothing about the right to health care in the Constitution'. And there's nothing about stem cells in there either. Nor is there anything about the right to privacy. Hilariously, the same people who wave the Constitution around on this issue are the ones who are claiming that Big Brother is invading their privacy!!