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Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Fact-Checking Kagen

I attended Kagen's health care listening session at Green Bay's Southwest High School on Monday night.

In response to a question that touched on illegal immigration, Kagen made the assertion that all of the 47 million uninsured in America are citizens. This elicited skeptical groans from the crowd. Groans that were correct, it would appear.

It looks like the actual number of uninsured is closer to 46 million and it seems clear that not all of them are citizens. Here's The Numbers Guy Blog from the WSJ on 6/24/09:

The Census Bureau estimates that the number of uninsured amounts to 45.7 million people. But the agency might be overcounting by millions due to faulty assumptions. Another problem: That 45.7 million figure includes undocumented immigrants, even though they aren't likely to be covered under new laws....

Clouding future projections of uninsured are tricky methods of counting them today. Even though legislation won't cover many of them, illegal immigrants are especially difficult to enumerate: Few raise their hands to be counted. Prof. Gruber estimates they make up about 13% of the uninsured today, or nearly six million people of that 45 million number.

On 8/5/09 Yahoo News had an AP article which included this:

All the plans would exclude illegal immigrants, who account for as much as 17 percent of the uninsured, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

A sensible debate and decision on how to address health care in this country starts with accurate facts.

It is clear that on this particular point Congressman Kagen simply doesn't have his facts straight, so how can we trust his conclusions?



1 comment:

Dad29 said...

Kagen's fallback will be that the law bars illegals from participating in the program.

What he WON'T tell you is that there is no "ID-check" provision.

Sorta like Wisconsin voting. Walk in, lie a little, and voila! You're in!!