How many uninsured?

On precisely this day one year ago I woke up in the ICU of Rex Hospital. I like to think I take pretty good care of myself, but the ICU is a place you can get to visit if you get a bad enough case of bleeding diverticulitis and you have good health insurance coverage -- both of which I had. I ended up spending four evenings at Rex and the total tab was over $20k. I probably paid no more than 10% of the bill. I consider myself very fortunate.

Today's WSJ has an article on how difficult it is to estimate the number of uninsured. Some are illegal immigrants who would not become insured under any of the proposals of which I am aware. There are all sorts of potential estimation errors. The official data come from household surveys, not employer reports. Health insurance comes in all sorts of flavors: deductibles, copays, what gets covered, and maximum payouts all vary considerably. No one knows how many employers will dump coverage if the government starts its own insurance plan.

Frankly this is a tough problem, one where politically unaffiliated experts would have a hard time reaching agreement about what is in society's best interests. At this point it would be a fool's errand to guess what Congress and the President will do.