By Ken Blackwell on 7.13.09 @ 6:08AM
On health care as well as the economy.
Vice President Joe Biden is the gift that keeps on giving. You
really can't say that he's put his foot in his mouth again. That
would suggest there's some other place for it. Biden has said the
Obama administration "misread" the numbers on how bad the economy
was.
Well, they had the full cooperation of the Bush administration in
what all acknowledge to have been the most cooperative transfer
of power in history. Why did they misread?
Now, the operative question is this: Has Obama's team also
misread the numbers on health care reform? The big number, the
number which drives all the other numbers is 45.7 million. That's
the number of Americans said to be lacking health insurance. If
that number is accurate, it's still less than one in six
Americans. But is it accurate?
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will has raised serious
questions about that 45.7 million figure. He notes that 39% of
the uninsured live in the border states of California, Texas,
Arizona, New Mexico, and Florida. An estimated 21% of the
uninsured are not U.S. citizens. That's 9.7 million, a huge chunk
of that fabled 45.7 million figure.
A further 9.1 million of the uninsured have household incomes of
$75,000 or greater. These folks could afford insurance but
choose not to be insured. There are, Will notes, 14 million
Americans who are already eligible for currently funded
programs -- like SCHIP, veterans' benefits, Medicare, and
Medicaid.
The more closely we examine these figures, the more that number
of 45.7 million begins to melt away, like an iceberg floating
south. As long as there have been governments, they have been
mesmerized by numbers -- some of which prove to be seriously
inaccurate.
Winston Churchill wrote about one of the most celebrated examples
of government's self-deception by numbers. During World War I,
the British Admiralty weighed in strongly against a
convoy system for their merchant ships to meet the threat of
death-by-strangulation from Germany's U-boats. The great and
powerful Sea Lords said there was no way the Royal Navy could
protect all 2,500 voyages per week of merchant ships
with their small number of 50-60 Navy destroyers. Convoys would
not work, the Sea Lords said adamantly.
With the very life of his country at stake, Churchill showed how
the Admiralty's numbers did not hold up. Those 2,500 voyages per
week actually included thousands of small ships plying their
usual coastal trade. The absolutely essential
overseas trade -- Britain's lifeline -- consisted of no
more than 120-140 voyages a week. "The whole edifice of [the Sea
Lords'] logical argument collapsed when the utterly unsound
foundation of 2,500 was shorn away," Churchill wrote. Convoys
were instituted -- and saved Britain.
Will the crisis atmosphere about health care also dissipate in
the hot glare of more accurate numbers? Will we find the crisis
to be rather like that southbound iceberg, or like the
Admiralty's inflated 2,500-voyage figure?
We may not think the life of America is in as great jeopardy now
as Churchill's Britain was when menaced by the U-boat. But it
surely is. If we take a giant step toward government control of
health care, we will step irretrievably closer to a regime where
government decides who shall live and who shall die. That is a
menace quite as threatening as a ring of hostile U-boats.
topics:
Health Care, Barack Obama, Joe Biden
