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Obama: I used to say 47 million uninsured. Now, it's 30 million.
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
09/09/09 7:18 PM PDT
In his speech tonight, the president introduced a new number in the health care debate. Remember all those statements from Democrats, including Barack Obama himself, that 47 million Americans are without health insurance? That's no longer the operative number. "There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage," the president said in tonight's speech.
But on August 10, at a town hall meeting, Obama referred to the "46, 47 million people without health insurance in our country…" And on July 23, he said, "This is not just about the 47 million Americans who don't have any health insurance at all…"
What's the difference? Obama appears to be choosing his words carefully. There is a difference between Americans who "cannot get coverage" and Americans who "don't have any health insurance at all." The interesting question is why Obama has chosen to downgrade the number from 47 million to 30 million. Look for Democrats to begin using the new figure in making the case for Obamacare.
UPDATE:
So why did Obama make the change? The first possibility is the difference between people who "don't have any health insurance" and people who "cannot get coverage." Millions of Americans who can afford health insurance choose not to have it, many of them because they are young, healthy and unlikely to need it. The second difference in Obama's phrasing is between "people without health insurance," in his old phrasing, and "American citizens" without coverage, as he said in last night's speech. Was Obama, faced with the (accurate) charge that the current Democratic health care proposals have no enforcement mechanism to prevent people in the United States illegally from receiving government-supported coverage, excluding non-citizens from his total?
The Associated Press goes with the first explanation, reporting that Obama's new figure comes from a new study of the issue:
The new number is based on an analysis by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, which concluded that about two-thirds of Americans without insurance are poor or near poor. "These individuals are less likely to be offered employer-sponsored coverage or to be able to afford to purchase their own coverage," the report said. By using the new figure, Obama avoids criticism that he is including individuals, particularly healthy young people, who choose not to obtain health insurance.
Perhaps that's the whole explanation. On the other hand, if Obama was excluding people in this country illegally, the numbers don't seem to match up. No one has claimed that there are 17 million illegal aliens in the United States without health insurance, and there are very few people who estimate that there are 17 million illegal aliens in this country at all.
It seems likely Obama was trying to combine these various concerns and came up with the rounded number of 30 million "American citizens who cannot get coverage." But hopefully the White House will release a more detailed explanation today.
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