Thursday, September 10, 2009

Rep. Joe Wilson May Not Have Been Too Far off on "You Lie" Shout

It seems that he is facing some kind of backlash with his emotional outburst but he might not have been too far off think what he is thinking. He has since apologized though.

Ninety minutes after Obama finished his address, the South Carolina representative—who yelled out "You lie!" after the president said he had never proposed providing coverage to illegal immigrants—issued a statement explaining he "let my emotions get the best of me." According to the congressman's office, Wilson also made a personal phone call to the White House in hopes of apologizing to Obama himself, but instead had to express his apologies to gatekeeper Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

The problem is that the much touted 47 million without insurance includes 10 million illegals.

However, the Census Bureau report “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the puts the initial number of uninsured living in the country at 46.577 million.

A closer look at that report reveals the Census data include 9.487 million people who are “not a citizen.” Subtracting the 10 million non-Americans, the number of uninsured Americans falls to roughly 37 million.

I did notice Obama started using a 30 million uninsured number instead of 47 million in his speech last night though.

We are the only advanced democracy on Earth — the only wealthy nation — that allows such hardships for millions of its people. There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone.

I think this may have been deliberate change in the number in order to debunk the notion that illegals will be covered. I can see though how Wilson thought that illegals are covered when the President keeps insisting that he will get coverage for 47 million people when that 47 million included 10 million illegals. Too bad the CBO can't get control of the Census Bureau so we can have these numbers broken out for everyone to see.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

so what.

Joemama said...

So the Obama people are finally using the correct number of 30 million instead of adding 10-17 million illegals to make the total number of uninsured seem higher.