More Faulty Research from Families USA
The Lewin Group is the source of a report (I don't use the term "study" for propaganda) by Families USA that claims "one-third of all Americans lack insurance." This hysteria was picked up by newspapers all across the country. One person counted stories in 200 papers that reported the information uncritically.
It turns out that Families USA arrived at these numbers by manipulating data from a bunch of different surveys and extrapolating them over a two-year period. So, it would include everyone who has changed jobs in the past two years. They have "lost" their health insurance when they went from one job to another job, even though the new job might also have provided coverage. It also includes all the people who are already eligible for a public program but haven't bothered to sign-up, and all the kids who graduated from college and didn't immediately get coverage, and all the new immigrants, legal or not, who aren't eligible for public programs in any case.
In fact, the problem of the uninsured is not a crisis and is not growing, as illustrated in the graphic. But don't tell that to the 200 newspapers that reported the Families USA numbers.
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Because employer-based coverage results in gaps (which HIPAA and COBRA fail to solve”, frictional uninsurance is unnecessarily high. I figure that 2 million or so of the uninsured are newly employed and in a waiting period at their new job (http://tinyurl.com/cmqnbv, pp. 12-13).
It would be fun to ridicule Families USA’s method by estimating how many years to lengthen out the period of observation before you could conclude that 100 percent of the population was uninsured. If the average person changes jobs every five years, and working live lasts 45 years, I suppose a very rough estimate would be 9 years.
Thanks for th graph. Always good to remind everyone about the facts.