The Phantom Uninsured

Health Care: The administration uses the "46 million uninsured" as a reason to nationalize health care. But the Census Bureau says about a fifth of those aren't U.S. citizens. In fact, a goodly number are illegal aliens.At a town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wis., last week, President Obama spoke of the need to cover the "46 million people who don't have health insurance." At another point he simply referred to the "46 million uninsured." At neither point did he refer to them as "Americans." That was wise, because not all them are, the Census Bureau says.According to "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States," a Census Bureau report published last August, of the 45.6 million persons in the U.S. that did not have health insurance at some point in 2007, 9.7 million, or about 21%, were not U.S. citizens.

I call them the “shadow society”......they have no driver license, no ins., they do not have judicial paternity of their children because they have not married the mommas of their babies, no citizenship for some..............it’s real man, they do not know you are supposed to take an interest in your kid’s schooling, you are supposed to come to the same place very night for decades to sleep, you need 3 meals per day every day and to have a J O B. It is pathetic.

I think my insurance company would notice if someone was filing claims in my name, and using my SS number. In fact, I would know, because I get a receipt in the mail from Blue Cross every time they pay for something for me, be it the doctor, hospital, pharmacy or whatever.

This ‘40 million uninsured’ is so bogus. It doesn’t matter if you have no insurance as long as you get health care when you’re sick.

every county I ever heard of has a health service to take care of indigent or low income sick people. That’s where the illegals go for health care for example.

I know from personal experience that the Harric County (Houston) Health District provides excellent health care to folks who don’t have insurance.

People who have no money and no insurance (as well as those who are in the country illegally) can get medical care in any case, so they don’t really have a problem.

The uninsured people who do have a problem are mostly self-employed people whose income may be fairly good but who can’t get medical insurance because of things like their medical histories, etc. Or, conversely, they may be self-employed people who could qualify for insurance but whose incomes aren’t high enough to permit them the high premiums that an individual subscriber has to pay.

However, all of these people taken together represent a very tiny percentage of US “health care consumers,” as they like to call us, and I think it would be fairly easy to deal with them by setting up pools where they could buy insurance.

Once upon a time, self-employed people could buy into affordable group insurance plans through professional and voluntary associations, but the spread of AIDS effectively killed that. Self-employed people in the arts had usually gotten their coverage that way, but they went from being a low-risk group to having huge medical bills, so the insurers stopped offering these plans (not only for arts-related organizations, but for all of them, unfortunately).

However, this is solvable and does not require billions of dollars from the Federal government.

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