Fact check: Families USA report on the uninsured
| July 16, 2009 | 12:52 PM
More journal entries from Cindy House »
The headline is pretty dire, and it showed up today in various forms across the country: 44,000 people in the U.S. are losing their health insurance coverage every week.
In fact, in Colorado, 780 people are apparently becoming uninsured every week.
The figures come from “The Clock is Ticking,” a report released Wednesday by Families USA. The health care reform advocacy group offered a state-by-state breakdown of growth in the number of uninsured through the end of next year, concluding that this is one of the reasons why the U.S. needs a reform package soon.
Depending on what side of the aisle you’re on, Families USA is either hailed as a champion for health care consumers, or reviled as another cog moving the nation toward socialism. With some of its previous reports, its research methodology has been picked apart by some, while others hail the group for its policy partnerships with “adversaries” such as Big Pharma.
I took a look at a sampling of news stories reported today based on “The Clock is Ticking” figures, and it struck me as odd that most of them were what we journalists call “one-source” stories. That is, the only source mentioned in the story was the Families USA report or a Families USA spokesperson. There weren’t any comments from opponents of health care reform.
OK, insert your “liberal media bias” phrase du jour here, but — knowing what it’s like in a newsroom on a daily basis — I’d like to give the reporters the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes they’ve done the reporting, and, right or wrong, it’s cut for space limitations.
That said, I still wondered if Families USA’s figures were accurate . . . are upward of 44,000 people in the U.S. losing their health insurance every week? Let’s take a quick look at some of their assertions and see what’s readily available to back them up:
- “The latest data from the Census Bureau indicate that some 45.7 million Americans lacked health coverage in 2007.” Yep, the Census Bureau really did report that.
- “National experts have predicted that at least 6.9 million more Americans will lose their health coverage by the end of 2010.” Yep, in the source cited for this figure — “Hard Times and Health Insurance,” a paper published in the Health Affairs policy journal — the authors really did predict that number.
Here’s where the math portion of the report comes in:
“In order to generate state-level numbers, Families USA calculated the share of uninsured, nonelderly individuals residing in each state using the most recent data reported in the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey for 2006-2007. We assumed that state losses in health coverage would parallel this distribution, and we apportioned the national estimate accordingly.”
This is all a fancy way of saying they took the 6.9 million predicted by the experts and divided it out proportionately based on state-by-state census data from 2006-2007. So, for instance — and I’m pulling numbers out of the air here — if California had 10 percent of America’s uninsured, nonelderly population in 2006-2007, the extrapolation is that they would have 690,000 uninsured people by the end of next year. You can then break that number down further by week or month.
Mathematically, it works. But logically, it doesn’t. First off, the uninsured data are from 2006-2007 — before the recession and its resulting job losses. Second, uninsured data are affected by unemployment, and that factor can vary widely from state to state and from week to week.
For instance, because of the turmoil in the auto industry, we can expect Michigan’s unemployment rate to climb this year, which would skew the uninsured rate. That means the Families USA figure of 1,040 health insurance losses every week for Michigan is probably going to be higher in actuality. Conversely, a state where unemployment is less affected by the recession would probably have a lower weekly number than the report indicates.
So, overall, the results from this analysis are mixed. Yes, the number of uninsured people will probably climb by millions in the next 18 months. But is Colorado really adding 780 people every week to the rolls of the uninsured? That’s not entirely certain.
colorado, economy, families usa, health care reform, unemployment, uninsured
