The Bureau of Census’s Current Population Report, Income, Poverty, and
Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2011 (September 2012) shows
48.6 million American men, women and children without health insurance. The Census
Bureau, in its technical notes, admits this is an over count. Some eight
million on Medicaid report themselves without insurance. This adjustment lowers
the number of uninsured to 40.6 million.
We can calculate the number of “non-poor” without health
insurance from the above Census Bureau report using the percentages of uninsured
people in families at different levels of household income. The official
poverty threshold income is between $11,484 for a single person and $22,891
for a family of four, I use $22,500 figure as the poverty threshold income.
The Census Bureau finds that 24.4 percent of uninsured
persons live in households earning less
than $25,000, 21.5% in households earning $25,000-$50,000, 15.4% in households
earning $50-75,000, and 7.8% in households earning more than $75,000.
We can use Internal Revenue Statistics
to multiply the number of households earning $22,500-$25,000, $25,000-$50,000,
$50,000-$75,000, and $75,000 or more by the percent of uninsured households in
each category. This procedure yields the number of uninsured households earning
$22,500-$25,000 (2.5 million), $25,000-$50,000 (7.2 million), $50,000-$75,000
(2.9 million), and $75,000 and above (2.3 million). We approximate the number
of uninsured people in households with incomes $25,000 and higher by
multiplying by the average
number of household members by income level.
The final tally is 36.1 million people in households earning
$22,500 or above that are uninsured. (We suspect that most of these people are
young. One quarter between 18 and 34 do not have health insurance).
We get the number of uninsured poor by subtracting the 36.1
million uninsured non-poor from the total uninsured of 40.6 million to get 4.5
million uninsured poor.
The Census Bureau reports that 9.8 million non-citizens are
uninsured. If we, as does President
Obama (in a television interview) exclude them from subsidized government
programs, they should be dropped from the insured poor ranks. Most non-citizens
are Hispanic who have a poverty rate of 25%. If we use the Hispanic figures, we
must drop another 2 million from the uninsured poor, for a total of 2.5 million
uninsured U.S.
citizens.
Given the vagaries and approximations of these calculations,
the 2.2 million figure (seven tenths of one percent of the U.S.
population) is probably not significantly different from zero. Only five
percent of the 46.2 million Americans in poverty lack health insurance, not
because it is not available to them, but they do not know about it or do not
care to enroll.
What?! (Or did you run out of gas?)
ReplyDeleteA downward trend in the number of people without health insurance: " In 2011, the percentage of
ReplyDeletepeople without health insurance
decreased to 15.7 percent from
16.3 percent in 2010. The number
of uninsured people decreased
to 48.6 million, down from 50.0
million in 2010..."
p.s., the word million is missing in the first sentence.
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ReplyDelete