please help debuke this pathetic RW spin (health insurance)

[hadrons]

They just told us that 44 million do not have health insurance. HEre's the FACTS
1. 3-4 million are wealthy and "self-insured"
2. 14 million people are eligible for gov't sponsored health plans and do not partake through ignorance or laziness.
3. Over 20 million of the "44" are those who were without insurance for one day or more due to unemployment or retirement. People who quit or retired from jobs and went to a govt sponsored health program are included as "the uninsured"
4. Any person who has no health insurance, that drives a new car, or has a new house, or goes out to dinner every week, or has cable or satellite TV services, or plays the lottery. . . . has MADE A CHOICE.

[NJCher]

1. what a joke

Cable and internet are 90 a month. Tell me where I can get an insurance policy for myself for 90 a month!!

I would ask for a source on the numbers. These numbers would have to be derived as a result of reading the rules for classifying the uninsured. Where are those parameters?

Also, repukes, where's the link for a gov't sponsored health plan? I've looked and found nothing.


Cher

[olddem43]

4. That's Hillary's plan that they and the AMA destroyed.

[ET Awful]

2. Why debunk? Have them prove their claim.

The massive number of unemployed is substantiated by the report released this week.

What proof do they have for their claims?

[hadrons]

3. he's ..well, an idiot

no proof needed

[baldguy]

5. Bullshit.

I don't have health insurence. I've got sattilite tv @ $40/mo. My phone bill including DSL is $80/mo.

health insurence through my employer is $325/mo. I could get it - if I cut out TV, telephone, food, & heat in the winter.

[papau]

6. None of the points in your post are in the released data - what's source?

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/hlthins.html

Health Insurance Data

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=a7tjM8qzDMKg&refer=us

Americans Without Health Insurance Rose to 45 Million (one in 6)
Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The number of Americans without health insurance climbed for a third straight year in 2003 to a record as the economy lost jobs and companies covered fewer people, a government report showed. <snip>

Employers cut benefits as insurance premiums rose 14 percent last year, six times the rate of inflation and the most since 1990, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. In today's report, the Census said 1.3 million fewer people were covered by company plans than in 2002. <snip>

The report also showed that the number of people covered by government health insurance programs rose to 76.8 million last year from 73.6 million the year before. Dan Weinberg, the Census Bureau's chief of household economic statistics, couldn't say whether state budget cuts in their Medicaid programs affected the number of uninsured. <snip>

The U.S. economy lost 61,000 jobs last year. Three out of five Americans get medical coverage through an employer, said Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. Eight out of 10 uninsured people were in families in which at least one person had a job, according to the Washington-based Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

Employers such as Procter & Gamble Co., Honeywell International Inc. and Pitney Bowes Inc. shifted more of the cost to workers, who paid on average 50 percent more last year than they did in 2000, the last year the number of uninsured Americans fell, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, based in Menlo Park, California. <snip>

Procter & Gamble raised deductibles and co-payments for the three different health plans offered to employees to lower the company's costs by five percentage points to 75 percent, said spokeswoman Jeannie Tharrington. "We did it so employees would become wiser consumers of health care, and know what it costs to have these procedures done,'' she said. <snip>

"Those are people whose family income is less than $35,000, and with this they have to pay taxes, they have to pay rent, mortgages, kids going to college,'' Reinhardt said. ``And then you plunk on top of them a family insurance policy now that's anywhere from $10,000 to $12,000 a year.''

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

7. Uhm, no.

I can't get health insurance because I keep getting rejected, and I quote, because I'm about 25 pounds overweight, have allergy induced asthma, and mild arthritis. I haven't made any fucking choices.

[elehhhhna]

8. Until we decouple health insurance from employment,

the current model is unworkable AND a job-killer. The paternalistic employer-based approach encourages age & sex discrimination in hiring and doesn't work. Rates are hurting businesses from the Fortune 100 to the self-employed. Yeah. And HMO's were going to fix everything. HA! Now they're untouchable price-wise (and atrocious serice-wise)thus they currently cost more than PPO's! Go figure.

Medicare is already in place and could be adapted for everyone, with money left over...the insurance execs (among the most highly-paid execs per indusrty--)can be retrained as telephone customer service lackeys or CNA's.

[tooncesj0nes]

9. how many people w insurance...

..had $5000 deductables like me?- I got a prescription for a medication and found that my insurance didnt cover it..My girlfriend is the head of the criminal justice dept at a local community college and they dont cover he only allergy medication that works or he..we found it at a Canada pharmacy..but * and his friend would lke to close that loophole..because you know, these foreign drugs may not be safe! God, I sleep so well at night knowing that the administration really care about us nare-do-wells taking potentially dangerous knockoff med...and all we ever do is complain.