Time to Question Authority

Like the congressmen they plead with and, for that matter, the professors who mentor them, activist college students rush headlong into the health care debate without questioning the facts at the heart of the controversy. “Comprehensive health care reform will help 31 million uninsured Americans, including well over 10 million from the millennial generation,” collegiate protestors wrote in a letter they delivered to Congress on March 17, 2010.

Among the signatories were such groups as:

• Bus Federation
• Campaign for America’s Future
• Campaign for Community Change
• Campus Camp Wellstone
• Campus Progress
• Choice USA
• College Democrats of America
• Demos
• The DNC Youth Council
• Forward Montana
• Future Majority
• Generational Alliance
• Rock the Vote
• Roosevelt Institute Campus Network
• Student Association for Voter Empowerment
• Young Democrats of America
• Young Invincibles
• Young People First
• Young People for Action
• United States Public Interest Research Group
• United States Student Association

A report which a quintet of leading academic figures signed onto seems to up the ante. The five were:

• Lee Bolinger, president of Columbia;
• Kathleen Cooper of the University of North Texas;
• Kenneth W. Dam of the University of Chicago;
• Ned Regan of the City University of New York; and
• John P. White of Harvard.

“But perhaps most seriously, on access, 47.0 million Americans were without health insurance in 2006, up from 38.7 million in 2000,” stated the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a non-governmental organization. The discrepancy with the number above supplied by Campus Progress and company might be due to the fact that the health care bill in Congress now does not actually cover all of the uninsured. “Seventy percent of Americans without health insurance would be covered by the new plan,” U. S. Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said at a conference put on by the American Action Forum on March 18, 2010.

Nevertheless, the CED goes on to undercut its own estimates by noting that, “From 2000 to 2006, the absolute number of people covered by [employer-based health insurance] EBI fell from 179.4 million to 177.2 million.” Thus the CED is reporting a drop in the number of people covered by employer plans of 2 million over the same time period when it tabulates an increase in the number of uninsured by 8 million.

At that, the U. S. government, from which these numbers ultimately come, may be wildly inflating the number of uninsured. Two former directors of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have said as much.

Last July, as American Journalism Center intern Mytheos Holt reported, former CBO chief June O’Neill claimed, “That number grossly misrepresents the size of the problem,” of the 47 million figure, adding that “the number of uninsured is not synonymous with those who lack health care because they can’t afford it.”

“Truth is, the number of chronically uninsured—for this exercise, let’s say, at least 12 months without insurance—is substantially lower, perhaps 20 million lower, when you examine other surveys that are likely to produce better results on this issue,” former CBO director Dan Crippen told the Senate Committee on Aging in 2003.

Indeed, a team of researchers reported in the September 2009 issue of Health Affairs that “the Current Population Survey estimates of the number of people lacking coverage for all of last year are much higher than other surveys’ all-year insurance estimates.”

“The estimate for people under age sixty-five lacking insurance coverage all year in 2005 was 44.4 million; in the National Health Interview Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the estimate was only 29.0 million. The estimate in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, was 34.8 million for the same year.”

So, the current health care proposals before Congress may not, as noted above, serve all of the uninsured and its sponsors might not particularly care how many of them there are. Meanwhile, these plans contain costs to the insured that unofficial and official observers are still tabulating.

For example, Americans for Tax Reform counts up 19 tax increases in the main health care bill. For good measure, the current CBO director informed U. S. Senator Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, on January 11, 2010 that the agency “estimates that premiums for Bronze plans purchased individually in 2016 would probably average between $4,500 and $5,000 for single policies and between $12,000 and $12,500 for family policies.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.