As I'm sure everyone knows because the buzz has been about nothing else, this is national Cover the Uninsured Week (not an official federal event, to be sure). The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has issued a report based on the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) showing the percentage of adults 18-64 in each state without health insurance in 2003. (This is cross-sectional data; larger percentages were without insurance at some time during the year. The BRFSS is a telephone survey that so it actually underrepresents poor people.)
The highest percentage of uninsured adults was in, ahh, Texas (27%). Competing for the top spot were Louisiana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Florida . . . Bringing up the rear, with the lowest percentage of uninsured adult residents, were Minnesota, Hawaii, Delware, DC, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Vermont . . .
Is anybody starting to see a pattern here? At Stayin' Alive, we always take a rigorous, scientific approach, so I fired up my trusty SPSS and ran a correlation between the percentage of the presidential vote in 2004 that went to what his name -- you know, that guy whose wife said last night that he tried to milk a male horse -- and the percentage of uninsured adults.
Another major sociological discovery for this site! The correlation coefficient (Pearson's r) for this relationship is .344, p=.014. The unstandardized regression coefficient is .574, which means that for every one point increase in the percentage of uninsured adults, the horse yanker got a little over half a percent more in the 2004 vote. It appears he has drawn the conclusion that the more uninsured people there are, the more popular he becomes, because his new budget will cut spending on Medicaid and insure that that the number of uninsured people gets larger. That's got to drive up his approval ratings, right?
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