These stand out to me because the number and percentage of Americans stated to be without health care doesn't seem to correlate with my impression of the number of Americans in existence, and I have heard some statistics that put the US as #1 for life expectancy when things like car accidents and murders are removed from the equation. My biggest problems with throwing numbers around is the lack of information regarding the source of the data so that I can go look it up for myself. That is an immediate red-flag in my mind that someone is trying to conceal something or manipulate the data to make their claims seem more important.
On to the amount of Americans without health care. According to the National Coalition on Health Care fact sheet:
Several studies estimate the number of uninsured Americans. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 47 million Americans, or 20 percent of the population under the age of 65, were without health insurance in 2008, their latest data available.
~NCHC Fact Sheet
I am a little skeptical about that number. First off, let's see how many people under the age of 65 the census bureau thought there was in 2008. Using this data from the 2008 1-Year estimate, I have calculated that 87.3% of the population is under the age of 65. If there are 304,059,728 people in the United States, and 87.3% of them are under the age of 65, then there are 265,444,142 (rounding the .544 off to make a whole number) people in the US under the age of 65. Assuming for a second that there really are 20% of those people uninsured, that would give us 53,088,828 (nearly 53 million) uninsured Americans - not the "nearly" 47,000,000 cited by the NCHC.
Now if we assume the NCHC number is correct (nearly 47 million uninsured Americans under the age of 65 are without health insurance), what percentage would that really give us? Using my number from before (265,444,142 Americans under the age of 65), then 47 million is only 17.706% of all Americans under the age of 65 without health insurance. I'll grant that these numbers are still depressing, but why the inflation? Why isn't the truth good enough? Lucky for me, the NCHC included their referenced material in their footnotes:
DeNavas-Walt, C.B. Proctor, and J. Smith. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2008. U.S. Census Bureau., September 2009.
~NCHC Fact Sheet
I dropped that into a Google search which produced this document. If you pop on over to page 27 of that PDF document, you'll be at the section relating to health insurance. This is the very first paragraph in that section:
The percentage of people without health insurance in 2008 was not statistically different from 2007 at 15.4 percent. The number of uninsured increased to 46.3 million in 2008, from 45.7 million in 2007 (Table 7 and Figure 6).
~U.S. Census Bureau
REALLY!? Even the high number (46.3 million) which includes people over the age of 65 doesn't equal the NCHC number of nearly 47 million people without health insurance. What numbers are they even looking at? According to this report (which is cited by the NCHC), there are 301,483,000 people in the US of which there are 46,340,000 people uninsured (about 15.4%). There are 263,695,000 people under the age of 65 in the US and 44,692,000 (nearly 45 million) of them are uninsured, about 16.95%. Again, I'm not trying to say that this isn't a lot of people; I'm just making the point that someone is not being truthful about there numbers and that seems a little suspicious.
Now my favorite: Life expectancy. Life expectancy is one of those really difficult things to calculate because there are so many variables. What are the chances of you getting struck by lightning or getting depressed and committing suicide or having a house fall out of a tornado and landing on top of you or being attacked by pirates on the high seas or... I think you are getting my point. None of those examples have anything at all to do with your health at the time of the incident that ends your life... unless you are trying to imply that having health insurance will protect you from the killer asteroid in Armageddon.
The most popular statistic sighted is that the US has the lowest life expectancy rating among developed nations... just above Cuba. Wolfram|Alpha is really useful for doing statistical analysis, so I asked it to show me data relating to life expectancy. It tells me that the United States is ranked 50th in the world with an average life expectancy of 78.11 years which beats out Cuba's expectancy of 77.45 years (ranked 57th). That sure beats Swaziland (ranked 227th) with an average expected life of 31.88 years! All of this data includes unnatural causes of death including car accidents and homicide. So what are the leading causes of death in the US? I found a World Health Organization database here that lists mortality statistics for all over the world, but it is friggin' huge and I don't remember access well enough to make use of the data. Luckily, as is often times the case on the internet, someone else has done the work for me. Scroll on down to the dynamic table and check out the description. When you remove fatal accidents from the equation of life expectancy (like car accidents, homicide, etc), the US all of a sudden is ranked #1 in life expectancy. You may also note that the data is from an older database (1999), but based on the data I've been sifting through from the WHO, this trend still seems to hold true (If you want to volunteer to sift through the latest access data, be my guest!).
The bottom line is this: the truth is absolutely more powerful the any other variation of data. As soon as it is picked up that the data you are using has been exaggerated in any way, your entire argument is suddenly no longer sound. If you are modifying this data, what else have you not told me? Why is the data being altered? Why are people lying to me over something as important as my own health? So much for private corporations being the ones we can't trust.
Now my favorite: Life expectancy. Life expectancy is one of those really difficult things to calculate because there are so many variables. What are the chances of you getting struck by lightning or getting depressed and committing suicide or having a house fall out of a tornado and landing on top of you or being attacked by pirates on the high seas or... I think you are getting my point. None of those examples have anything at all to do with your health at the time of the incident that ends your life... unless you are trying to imply that having health insurance will protect you from the killer asteroid in Armageddon.
The most popular statistic sighted is that the US has the lowest life expectancy rating among developed nations... just above Cuba. Wolfram|Alpha is really useful for doing statistical analysis, so I asked it to show me data relating to life expectancy. It tells me that the United States is ranked 50th in the world with an average life expectancy of 78.11 years which beats out Cuba's expectancy of 77.45 years (ranked 57th). That sure beats Swaziland (ranked 227th) with an average expected life of 31.88 years! All of this data includes unnatural causes of death including car accidents and homicide. So what are the leading causes of death in the US? I found a World Health Organization database here that lists mortality statistics for all over the world, but it is friggin' huge and I don't remember access well enough to make use of the data. Luckily, as is often times the case on the internet, someone else has done the work for me. Scroll on down to the dynamic table and check out the description. When you remove fatal accidents from the equation of life expectancy (like car accidents, homicide, etc), the US all of a sudden is ranked #1 in life expectancy. You may also note that the data is from an older database (1999), but based on the data I've been sifting through from the WHO, this trend still seems to hold true (If you want to volunteer to sift through the latest access data, be my guest!).
The bottom line is this: the truth is absolutely more powerful the any other variation of data. As soon as it is picked up that the data you are using has been exaggerated in any way, your entire argument is suddenly no longer sound. If you are modifying this data, what else have you not told me? Why is the data being altered? Why are people lying to me over something as important as my own health? So much for private corporations being the ones we can't trust.
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