How many uninsured Americans are there really? It’s a number that the mainstream media have repeatedly misrepresented to make the health care “crisis” seem worse than it is.
Business & Media Institute’s Julia A. Seymour hammered this point in an apprearance on Fox Business. Seymour exposed the common error by breaking down the actual number to more than 30 million less than the media claim it is.
Journalists have used the statistic of 46 million-47 million uninsured Americans, but as Seymour told Fox Business, this number was wildy inflated. “The Census Bureau comes up with this number and they said that the number of uninsured is really 45.6 million people. But that's total people, and that includes almost 10 million who are non-citizens,” Seymour clarified.
That meant the label “Americans” after “uninsured” was totally inaccurate. But that wasn’t the only ambiguous part of this overused statistic. Seymour also broke the statistic further down, explaining that almost 9 million were young people who didn’t need of health insurance, and 9 million were those who make more than $75,000 and chose not to buy insurance.
Seymour spelled out to host Stuart Varney that contrary to what the media have told their viewers, the number of “chronically uninsured,” according to the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation, was only somewhere between 8 million and 13 million people.
But even these people were not lacking in health care. “We all have healthcare, but the media say healthcare because they use that term to promote universal coverage. What they really should be saying is that there are a number of people without health insurance…” Seymour explained, “So the crisis is actually much smaller than the news media make it out to be.”
