The authors of a recent paper published in National Review examined the 27 million Americans who have no health insurance and whether those individuals actually have access to insurance. (here) They used data collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation that was released in January 2019. (here)

After careful review of the 28 page KFF report, here are the findings:

“A Kaiser Family Foundation  analysis of last year’s Census Bureau report found that, of the estimated 27.4 million non-elderly people who were uninsured in 2017:

• 6.8 million (25 percent) were eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but not enrolled.
• 8.2 million (30 percent) were eligible for Obamacare subsidies (in the exchanges) but did not enroll.
• 3.8 million (14 percent) declined an offer of employer-sponsored coverage.
• 1.9 million (7 percent) were not eligible for subsidies because they had income more than four times the federal poverty threshold, which put them in the top two income quintiles.
• 4.1 million (15 percent) were ineligible for subsidies because they were not lawful U.S. residents. Their situation is a matter to be settled by immigration policy, not health care policy.
• 2.5 million (9 percent) were under the poverty line but ineligible for federal assistance. They represented just 0.7 percent of the population.”

The 1.9 million people who earned too much to qualify for Obamacare subsidies still had access to health insurance in the private individual market, but chose to go uninsured. The 2.5 million low-income Americans who were not eligible for government assistance were in states that chose to not expand Medicaid as allowed under the Affordable Care Act. As the authors report, these people represent less than one percent of the overall population of the United States.

The critical point is that health insurance is available to virtually everyone in the U.S. under the existing health care system. Advocating for a complete government takeover of the system because of the “millions of uninsured” is at best disingenuous and at worst is deceitful.