America?s uninsured are in the news again, by virtue of a Census Bureau report released late last month showing that, as The Washington Post put it, ?The nation's poverty rate declined last year for the first time this decade, but the number of Americans without health insurance rose to a record 47 million,? or to about 16 percent of the population...

Absent from this story, however, is any meaningful breakdown that helps us understand just who is uninsured, for how long, and why. Also absent is the fact that the total of 47 million is disputed.

...According to Census data, a little less than 46.6 million persons in America are uninsured, not 47 million. By rounding up to the next whole number, it does bring that figure up to 47 million, but it also makes the problem seem just a little worse than it really is...

But the Census data also show that 9.5 million of the uninsured listed themselves as ?not a citizen?: they aren?t Americans. The total now drops to 37.1 million, about 12 percent of the population.

The Census report also shows that 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. If we are concerned about the number of Americans that cannot afford health insurance, should we really count those that can afford it?

...So, 37.1, minus 8.3, minus 8.7, now leaves us with 20.1 million people without health insurance, which is approximately seven percent of the population, a far cry from the 16 percent we have been led to believe by the socialized medicine lobby and the compliant media, who either support socialized medicine or are too lazy to actually examine these claims.

...If we believe the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is a frequent source for the mainstream media, Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and who make less than $50,000 a year total somewhere between 13.9 million and 8.2 million, no more than 5 percent of the population. Furthermore, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 45 percent of uninsured people will be uninsured for less than four months.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: Does it make any sense to destroy a health care system that 5 out of 100 people do not have adequate access to?