Zombies…we seem to love them.  Movies, TV, comic books-they’re everywhere.  Keeping with this popular theme of the dead, the near-dead, and the re-animated recently-dead, today’s thoughts on the Patient-Protection & Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PP & ACA of 2010), seeks to shed light on the crisis of the missing O-Zombies.

Recall during the fury of Obama’s fevered sales pitch for health care reform that one of his key narrative themes was ‘the urgency of sweeping healthcare reform to alleviate the suffering of 50 million uninsured Americans’.  The story was concocted to convince us that we were in the throws of a Category-5, five-alarm, DefCon1 healthcare crisis.  After all folks, 50 million Americans…wow, that is an amazing number of victims.  Absent immediate action, 50 million uninsured people would be doomed to aimlessly wander the healthcare system, ignored, all the while jeopardizing the essential fabric of our nation’s finances.  Notice that like the President, I substituted “people” for “Americans” in the last sentence.  So did the the President’s speechwriters once they figured out there were gaping holes in the narrative.  Like their TV-Zombie counterparts, conjure up a vision of O-Zombies’ faces pressed up to the figurative fence of the healthcare establishment- their desperate un-sated appetites threatening the Republic.

Facts don’t agree with this narrative.  As usual, the more we know, the more unsettling this whole charade now seems.  To those who are just now re-thinking their support as they navigate the new system, it is apparent that healthcare-Nirvana is a hoax .  Don’t get me wrong.  The previous system wasn’t perfect.  Many reform opportunities were apparent.  Imagine the prior healthcare system going through medical triage…first you deal with the most critical cases.  We were led to believe that there were 50 million critical cases…a figure so high that the only solution would be to blow up the entire system and re-build it from scratch.

Facts are important in order to form a considered opinion.  In the past, I have cited the Federal Government’s annual Census Bureau report titled: Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States.  As recently as 2009, in one of the tables dedicated to the percentage of our population without health insurance, the data sliced and diced every which-way including foreign-born citizens, non-citizens, ethnicity etc., and then tallied.  Included was a section breaking out the data by annual income- this data was represented as “Household Income”.  For your reading pleasure and so that I can not be accused of making this stuff up, go to page 23 of the 2009 report at:

http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/p60-238.pdf

Now that you’re on that page, let’s roll the highlight film and hunt down the 50 million O-Zombies.  Before we jump into that, please note that from 2010 forward, the Federal Government’s Census Bureau annual report eliminated the highly illuminating but provocative category of “Household Income”.  When you see how this skews our Zombie hunt, you’ll quickly see that it was an “inconvenient truth”.  Why you ask?  How effective would the narrative for Healthcare reform have been if 50 million O-Zombies turned out to be a fictitious number?  Since we have the benefit of a similar table for the year 2011, published in 2012, let’s use those numbers in the interest of accuracy.  We’ll have to use the 2009 numbers that break out the uninsured by “Household Income” since these figures mysteriously turned up AWOL in subsequent years.

In the year ending 2010, we had approximately 311 million people living in the US.  If you only focus on the top line of stated total “uninsured”, the report indicates just under 48 million…seems reasonable and it’s darn close to the administration narrative claims of 50 million O-Zombies.  We’ll concede they simply “rounded-up”.  Now let’s drill down several layers in the report and examine who makes up the nearly 48 million uninsured, and perhaps more importantly, determine the veracity of this key pillar of the narrative.

Here’s and easy one- 9.5 million of these US residents are NON-CITIZENS.  We may diverge over whether to count or not count these folks- I do not count NON-CITIZENS in the 48 million, and oh, by the way, the PP&ACA of 2011 agrees in case you argue the opposite.  Next, let’s look at another startling component of the newly remaining 38.5 million unaccounted O-Zombies- uninsured folks making more than $50K a year.  This is where the handy but recently deceased “Household Income” figures are useful.  Presumably, once one reaches a certain income level, carrying health insurance in even the most basic and affordable catastrophic-policy form would seem to be reasonable family or individual spending priority since the risk of not doing so is so impacting and irresponsible.  But no- in 2008, there were 16.7 million folks making $50K + annually who chose not to purchase health insurance either individually or through employer sponsored plans.  Before you wring your hands and declare that $50K a year is near-poverty, 9.7 million of them made $75K+.  By the way, if you’d still like to argue that at a household income level of $50K +, it would be unfair to expect that healthcare insurance coverage be purchased…well, Obamacare disagrees and says that at just under $50K in annual household income, you are above the 400% poverty scale and thus- to bad, so sad, you are on the hook for buying insurance, or suffer the penalty.

Our new O-Zombie target list is thus reduced to 21.8 million.  You probably get it by now…there are not, and there never were 50 million O-Zombies.  But let’s keep hunting…The 21.8 million possible O-Zombies can be further reduced when considering that a segment of the accrued total of O-Zombies includes folks ages 19-34 years of age who by virtue of youth are Spartan consumers at the healthcare buffet and choose to ignore the system.  The 2012 report shows that of our total population, 68 million of these young folks are out and about.  Since there is likely overlap between this segment and some of the other categories above, let’s use a conservative figure of 10% or 6.8 million as a place-marker to further lower the total “real-suffering uninsured” to 15 million.

So there it is.  The PP&ACA of 2011 proponent’s critical narrative of a looming mega-crisis with 50 million O-Zombies was a blatant deception.  Now add in some other tid-bits that we can now see with 20/20 hindsight were lies-like-  “If you like your insurance you’ll be able to keep it”; “if you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor”; “average premiums will go down $2,500 a year”…  Proponents who in the face of all of this data still insist that this was the right thing to do will naturally gravitate to the all encompassing age-old pablum that to reverse course will plunge the poor and the sick into oblivion, and the Zombie Apocalypse will blossom.  I find it comforting that if the Apocalypse were to occur, about 2% of our population would be affected versus the administration advertised +15%.  With accurately targeted changes, we’re smart enough to be able to fix things for the truly indigent 2% without breaking the entire system for the remaining 98%.

Final thoughts…during one of POTUS’s stage-managed press conferences, would someone please ask him why the “Household Income” table disappeared from the annual Census report.  With the bow-wave of pent-up demand claimed by the cheering section for Obamacare, one would think that there would have been a sign-up rush rivaling the opening bell for tickets to a free U2 concert.  Since there were never 50 million O-Zombies, the rush is not on, and it never could have been.  The more one knows about this law, the less compelled one is to rush in and sign up.  Said differently, there should have been 50-75 million hits on the web-site on day one if the disease looking for a cure was as desperate as most were deceived into believing.

If we could examine a real-time view of the sign-up and inquiry statistics for those who have been fortunate enough to successfully navigate the morass of the recent Obamacare web-launch, here’s what we’d likely discover- a great number of these folks are like me; folks who have recently been dropped from existing long-standing plans that were affordable and we were happy with.  We’re the real O-Zombies…thoughtful, dependable and responsible citizens who have been forced to seek out a new policy to replace the one that was working fine.  Go ahead- vilify Ted Cruz for using one of the few remaining minority points of leverage in attempt to reverse course.  (see past LW article regarding Gridlock) With the facts as I know them, I think I see his point.  If not now, when?  This law is only moments away from becoming an rock-hard entitlement institution with a permanent constituency.  It will simply become a new avenue for indirect taxation and re-distribution of wealth.  If you don’t believe me…even Chief Justice Roberts agrees.