Michael F. Cannon and Ramesh Ponnuru write an article called “You Mislead!”, which is apparently the NRO method of sympathizing with Joe Wilson, two weeks late and with a lot more lying.
You see, they’re going to “fact check” Obama’s healthcare speech, which is so full of terrible, glaring missteps that even reports cited misleadingly and out of context disprove every point he tried to make. That is how bad it is, my friends. Let’s look at their first couple of points (the italicized portions are Obama quotes):
1. “Buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer.” The Congressional Budget Office writes, “Premiums for policies purchased in the individual insurance market are, on average, much lower — about one-third lower for single coverage and one-half lower for family policies.” It is true that individual insurance policies are generally 30 percent less comprehensive than employer-provided insurance, and comparable individual policies are about twice as expensive. But much of the extra cost is a function of the tax penalty on purchasing such insurance and the stunted market that penalty has yielded.
Actually, the authors leave out the next part of the CBO’s argument, which I’ve reproduced in full:
Premiums for policies purchased in the individual insurance market are much lower—about one-third lower for single cover- age and half that level for family policies. In large
part, those differences reflect the fact that policies purchased in the individual market cover a lower share of enrollees’ health care costs, on average, which also encourages enrollees to use somewhat fewer services. At the same time, average administrative costs are higher for individually purchased policies. The remainder of the difference in premiums probably arises because people
who purchase individual coverage have lower expected costs for health care to begin with.
There’s no support for the tax penalty contention from the CBO. Whatsoever. More importantly, the major reasons that individual policies cost any less is because they’re generally worse insurance for younger and healthier people. In other words, Obama was completely right about the drastically increased expense for purchasing comprehensive health insurance individually…but it doesn’t count because of something something ACORN.
2. “There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”An outright falsehood, whether you use the president’s noncitizen-free estimate or the standard, questionable estimate of 46 million uninsured residents.
A study prepared for the federal government estimates that 9 million people counted as “uninsured” in the standard estimate are in fact enrolled in Medicaid. The left-leaning Urban Institute estimates that 12 million are eligible but not enrolled, meaning they could get coverage at any time. Health economists Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania and Kate Bundorf of Stanford estimate that one quarter to three quarters of the uninsured can afford to purchase coverage, but choose not to do so.
I really wish we were in the middle of a game of Mortal Kombat right now so that a distorted, bass-driven voice could yell out, “DEVASTATING” right now. And then I wish the arcade operator would come over and reset the machine, because it’s malfunctioning rather terribly.
Is saying there are 30 million uninsured, particularly based on the sources cited, an “outright falsehood”? Well, technically, yes, because the sources cited all say there are more uninsured than that, even with the exclusions. For instance, the government report:
For CY 2003, correcting for an undercount of 17 million persons lowers the full year uninsured estimate by just over 9 million persons. For CY 2003, with this adjustment, the almost 36 million uninsured (as compared to an unadjusted 45.0 million) is more consistent with the full year uninsured count reported by MEPS of 31.7 million (although for an earlier year).
In 2003, years before the economy took its current tumble, there were somewhere between 32 and 36 million uninsured. And Barack Obama said 30 million in 2009, which is basically akin to saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, except with a greater chance of killing your grandmother.
Now, the Urban Institute piece, which is actually from the Kaiser Foundation, but whatever, because Bill Ayers runs the whole thing. Its first page shows the following graph:
44.6 million uninsured, 25% of which (11.15 million, but what’s an extra million between people who are ideologically opposed to each other?) are eligible for public assistance, leaving 33.45 million who are uninsured and ineligible for public assistance. And that was in 2007. (Also remember that, from their initial contention, the authors preferably wanted you to subtract the covered-but-not-insured from the 30 million number, assuming that the only difference between the higher number and the lower number was illegal immigrants.)
There are two explanations for why Cannon and Ponnuru are unfailingly dishonest in “correcting” Obama. The first is that they’re hoping that a gullible yet uninformed audience buys into everything they say and harasses your libtard face with it every chance it gets. The second is that Cannon and Ponnuru took the affirmative action-bake sale route through undergrad and never went to class enough to learn that you can’t prove your point just by yelling at minorities and liberals with made up numbers.
My vote is both.
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You know, Mark Pauly and Kate Bunford can “estimate” my ass. I love that they “estimate” that people can get insurance but choose not to. What is their definition of choosing not to?
Is it calling around to five or six insurance companies and getting “estimates” of monthly insurance premiums that on paper, when looking at my gross income (which is what all these studies do. They never look at the actual net), should be affordable but in practice, if I want to eat or even go out once in a while with friends, I could never afford to do that and pay for insurance?
Is it paying two to three hundred dollars a month for insurance that doesn’t cover you for what you actually need it to cover (say, the pre-existing condition that the insurance company wrote a special rider in order to be able NOT to cover any treatment for), so instead of wasting $200 a month on something that won’t pay any near-term dividends while still having to shell out the cash price of seeing the doctor and getting the medication you need, you decide, “Fuck it. If I don’t have to pay for this crap insurance, that money each month can go toward the medicines and care I actually need”?
I mean, let’s get some real definitions of people just willy-nilly saying, “Fuck insurance. I’m a gambler.” Cause all the people I know without have one of the two reasons above or any number of completely rational reasons that any thinking human adult would come up with in the untenable situation of medical care being treated as a commodity. I mean, for fuck’s sake, there are letters in the fucking U.S. News from actual idiotic people arguing for MORE commodification of health care and you can all go fuck off if you get sick.
I hope those people who think health insurance is the same as auto insurance get to choose between totalling out their body after a catastrophic illness or accident and paying for repair. I bet they choose total cause it’s just easier, and it will be too late at that point to tell them that it’s near to impossible to get a replacement body, unlike buying a replacement car. Also, how much is the Kelly Blue Book value on my body? I have a bit of cellulite, some shin splints, and hyperthyroidism.
It’s disgusting.