On Health Care
Somebody said something rather stupid today in the Dallas Morning News. For those of you who just flew in from the face of Venus, I’ll provide you the link.
Almost one of every four Texas residents – 24.8 percent – were uninsured in 2006 and 2007, based on an average of the rates for those two years. That’s up from 23.9 percent for 2004 and 2005.
…
But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)
So most of the liberal blogs stopped there and had a roast of John Goodman. Fair enough. What Goodman said is ridiculous. He hasn’t been what we call in my business, “media trained.” In other words, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to see in print. No doubt, he’s wishing someone had given him that little nugget before a reporter from the Dallas Morning News called him up yesterday.
But the blogs ranting on Goodman do a bit of an injustice in not reporting the rest of his (still foolish, but somewhat rational) quote. Here, I’ll help:
“So instead of producing worthless statistics that people fling around in vacuous editorials and pointless debates, the Census Bureau should produce meaningful numbers, identifying all of the sources of funds people will draw on if they need medical care,” he said.
To his point, to say this person is uninsured, or that person is insured, lacks nuance. It lacks context and most of all it doesn’t address the problem.
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