Gallup: Uninsured Rate Up Since Obama Elected

Seriously?

I’m sure there will be a bunch of self-congratulatory press releases and legacy media “news” reports on this Gallup poll.

If you move the goalposts far enough, you’re sure to score.

Gallup has a fairly honest headline: “In U.S., Uninsured Rate Lowest Since 2008”. But, hm, what happened in 2008? Let’s keep looking at the chart. The low was 14.4 percent, just before the financial crisis. Makes some sense, I’m sure a lot of people lost health insurance then. At the start of the Obama Administration, the rate was 15.6 percent; the peak was 18 percent — in roughly the third quarter of last year. Remember that, when people were objecting because they’d had their insurance canceled? Harry Reid said all those people were lying, but Gallup says different. In fact, 1 percentage point on this chart is, roughly, 3 million people. The change from Q1 to Q3 was about 2 percent — or roughly 6 million people who became uninsured.

Where have I heard that number before?

And now for the punchline: Since Obama was inaugurated in 20082009, the net change is from 15.4 percent uninsured to 15.6 percent. So the net effect has been that by the Gallup Survey the number of uninsured has improved in the last year, but gotten worse since Obama was inaugurated, and is 1.2 percent worse than under Bush.