QandO

August 27, 2004

The Highest uninsured rate since Herbert Hoover...er, Bill Clinton?
Posted by Jon Henke

This data will be making the Democratic talking points...

A stagnant economy and rising health care costs helped push the percentage of people in the USA without health insurance last year to 15.6% of the population...

...the highest since the share hit a peak of 16.3% in 1998.

As we've noted here often, our health care system is terribly mangled, and a change is absolutely warranted. Of course, when we say "a change", we don't mean "more government".

For future reference, though, the Census Bureau lists these stats...[formatted differently for your viewing pleasure]

Covered by private or government health insurance

2003.......83.2
2002.......83.3
2001.......84.2
2000 9/...84.8
1999 8/...84.4
1999.......83.5
1998.......82.7
1997 7/...82.4
1996.......82.9
1995.......83.2
1994 6/...83.4
1993 5/...82.9

Covered by private or government health insurance

2003.......67.3

Now, one can argue whether the number of insured people should be legislated higher--i.e., "government provides health insurance"--or whether the government should stay out of it and allow people to make their own choices.

We could argue all of that, discuss Canada, per-capita health care spending, a priori economic assumptions on efficient allocation of resources, and the number of MRI machines in Tennessee.

We could discuss all of that, and and I think we probably will over the course of the next few years. Socialized medicine is coming and, as Dan Patrick might say, we can't stop it...we can only hope to contain it.

UPDATE: Via INDC Journal, I see Prudent Politics has taken on the poverty aspect of the report.

The first thing that stands out to me when looking at this graph is that the years with the lowest number of poor were in the booming years of the 1970's.

I also noticed that a poverty rate of 12.5 percent is still one of the lowest poverty rates since 1959. Any idea why AP didn't report this?

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