The bleeding hearts will give you statistics like, “22,000 adults died in 2006 because they did not have health insurance” as a reason to support the Obama Health Care Plan. While that is sad, Obama’s plan DOES NOTHING to solve this particular problem.
Let’s break it down.
America has about 3.5M homeless. 1.4M of those are children. That means 2.1M adult homeless people. How many of these people have medical insurance? None.
For the adult homeless, let’s assume a fixed distribution between 19 and 75, and lets assume they have a typical life expectancy (although they probably live less). That means that at least 38,596 of them will die this year. Will many of them die because they didn’t have health insurance? Of course! But unless Obama’s magic health care plan can also solve homelessness, these statistics aren’t going to change one bit. So the whole claim that this is a problem with our insurance program is bunk.
Make your own conclusions about Obama’s health care plan. But when you hear these ludicrous arguments about “number of uninsured Americans”, “number of Americans to die without insurance”, “high cost of insurance” – remember these statistics are very complicated and never accurately summarized in a pithy headline.