“Paging Dr. Dover. Dr. Ben Dover…”

I don’t recall where, but in the comments somebody asked a question about the number of uninsured in our country.  That is a very, very good question and we need to talk about that more.  This needs to be a big part of the debate on health care.  I believe Mark Steyn has recently written a new piece on this topic, which I cannot find, but here is some data from a piece who wrote back in 2007 for the  OC Register:

Nobody really knows how many “uninsured” there are: Two different Census Bureau surveys conducted in the same year identify the number of uninsured as A) 45 million or B) 19 million. The first figure is the one you hear about, the second figure apparently entered the Witness Protection Program. Of those 45 million “uninsured Americans,” the Census Bureau itself says over 9 million aren’t Americans at all, but foreign nationals. They have various health care back-ups: If you’re an uninsured Canadian in Detroit, and you get an expensive chronic disease, you can go over the border to Windsor, Ontario, and re-embrace the delights of socialized health care; if you’re an uninsured Uzbek, it might be more complicated. Of the remaining 36 million, a 2005 Actuarial Research analysis for the Department of Health and Human Services says that another 9 million did, in fact, have health coverage through Medicare.

 
Where are we now? 27 million? So who are they? Bud and Mabel and a vast mountain of emaciated husks of twisted limbs and shriveled skin covered in boils and pustules? No, it’s a rotating population: People who had health insurance but changed jobs, people who are between jobs, young guys who feel they’re fit and healthy and at this stage of their lives would rather put a monthly health-insurance tab towards buying a home or starting a business or blowing it on booze ’n’ chicks.
That last category is the one to watch: Americans 18-34 account for 18 million of the army of the “uninsured.” Look, there’s a 22-year-old, and he doesn’t have health insurance! Oh, the horror and the shame! What an indictment of America!
Well, he doesn’t have life insurance, either, or homeowner’s insurance. He lives a life blessedly free of the tedious bet-hedging paperwork of middle age. He’s 22, and he thinks he’s immortal – and any day now Hillary will propose garnishing his wages for her new affordable mandatory life-insurance plan.
So, out of 45 million uninsured Americans, 9 million aren’t American, 9 million are insured, 18 million are young and healthy. And the rest of these poor helpless waifs trapped in Uninsured Hell waiting for Hillary to rescue them are, in fact, wealthier than the general population. According to the Census Bureau’s August 2006 report on “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage,” 37 percent of those without health insurance – that’s 17 million people – come from households earning more than $50,000. Nineteen percent – 8.7 million people – of those downtrodden paupers crushed by the brutal inequities of capitalism come from households earning more that $75,000.

Medical care is a funny thing.  I’ll bet 100% of us do not like the “system” at some point.  See Wankette’s post here for an example.  There are bad doctors out there.  There are lousy insurance companies.  There are incompetent claims adjusters.  It’s a huge system and there are 300 million of us.  It ain’t always going to be pretty.  But, why are we going to turn the whole kit and kaboodle over to the government?  (I know Obama’s plan says it won’t do that, but I’ll post later on why it will, despite what he claims.)  We don’t really have a crisis of the uninsured in this country.  As Mark Steyn’s piece correctly points out, we’ve got a crisis of illegal immigrants and a crisis of folks who already qualify for Medicare but do not bother to fill out the forms and a crisis of young people, often earning more than enough to buy insurance, who are choosing to do other things with their money.  None of those point to major issues with private insurance offering affordable coverage and options.

The government is trying to fix the wrong problem.  What track record does the government have of successfully solving problems when they try to fix them?  How bad will this be when they try to fix a problem we don’t even have?  At a minimum health care spending is 16% of our economy.  16%! of the world’s largest economy!  We cannot let the U.S. government control 16% of our economy.  Freedom, liberty, capitalism and choice will die under the weight of a hulking, inefficient, unfeeling government bureaucracy.

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