> it's true if you define the above incomes as the
> bottom 2 quintiles IIRC.
I guess if you look at the 5 groups, I would call the middle 2, 3, and 4. But it's gotta include at LEAST 3. Or are you syaing that the upper 3 quintiles are what constitutes "upper-income" ...? Are more than half of the households "upper-income" ...?
Ok, anyway, so according to this:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/img/incpov03/fig11.jpg
we're talking about no more than $34k of household income for the lower two. Wait, let's back up for a minute: 15.6% of the population doesn't have insurance (holy smokes, health insurance is "within the means" of 84.4% of the entire population!). So how can it be that it's "beyond the means" for "most" of any of these people (even granting that 40% are lower- or middle-, which is probably an underestimate) ...? Surely some of them are (especially in the bottom quintile) eligible for insurance through the Medicaid programs (like Medi-Cal in California: current caseload is about 5.5M people), so where are those uninsureds?
Well, here's a good one:
http://covertheuninsuredweek.org/factsheets/display.php?FactSheetID=108
It looks like 45% of the uninsured have family incomes that are more than twice the poverty level. A solid 25% of them have family incomes under the poverty level and are thus quite likely covered by a government program.
8.6% of families with incomes over $50k are uninsured; the median household income is around $43k, so let's bluff a little and say that at least 9% of the upper 50% are uninsured. That's 4.5% of the total, or about 30% of the total. I'm pretty sure that if your household income is $50k or above you can afford health insurance.
> You still haven't mentioned what specific health service is
> available to US citizens that Canadians are denied?
Extrordinary administrative overhead? Extreme marketing to doctors and consumers for prescription drugs? Emergency room care for the common cold? HMO CEOs who make $130M/year?
