The Real Size of the Uninsured Population (UPDATE from See-Dub)

Back on July 10 I put up a post called, "Q. When is 45 million not 45 million?" in which I questioned the standard number for Americans without health insurance. That post made two points: the first was that 9 of the 45 million were not citizens of the United States, and the second was that of the remaining 36 million, only about half did not have health insurance for extended periods of time. I caught quite a bit of flak for that article, though by the time I got a chance to respond to my critics, most of them had returned to Diggspace.

Immersed in all the brouhaha, I didn't notice an article written about a week later: Health Care Lie: '47 Million Uninsured Americans' by the Business and Media Institute (never heard of them). In that article, the author makes the same point about non-citizens being included in the total, but then goes on to say:

...there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.
...
So what is the true extent of the uninsured “crisis?” The Kaiser Family Foundation, a liberal non-profit frequently quoted by the media, puts the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 13.9 million and 8.2 million.

At the time I was claiming that there perhaps 18 million people who could be considered "chronically uninsured." It looks like the real number is even smaller than that.

SEE DUB sez: I went to the Kaiser Family Foundation website to try to find the original source for that estimate. Still looking, but I thought this was worth noting (full report .pdf here; this is from page 17, Appendix A.):

The key results are that we estimate about five million uninsured to be undocumented non citizens. The number identified as eligible for current coverage (because undocumented non citizens are not eligible for public programs) would fall from 11.0 million to 9.7 million. There would also be a significant increase in those needing assistance, 24.9 million to 26.1 million. Of the latter, 4.8 million would be undocumented non-citizens.

If I understand that conclusion correctly, 26.1 million needing insurance minus 4.8 million illegal aliens/ "undocumented Americans" (who, while they might want health insurance are not eligible for it)= 21.3 million uninsured. Very close to Geoff's back of the envelope, no-grant-from-a-fancy-liberal-think-tank 18 million (see the first link in this post).

That's not an insignificant number, and neither Geoff nor I have ever said it is. But it does raise questions about the magnitude of the health crisis and how much the numbers behind it are politicized.

It also raises another question: five million undocumented aliens? That's about half the number I'm used to hearing. Is it possible that number is inflated as well? Or is a large portion of the illegal immigrant population somehow receiving insurance, perhaps through the use of "borrowed" social security numbers?

In any case, if you use a more widely bandied-about, though not necessarily more accurate, figure of ten million illegal aliens, you get--16.1 million uninsured Americans.