“Missing” mostly from Latin America

Last night, Scott wrote about “Obama’s missing millions.” These are the 16 million people who were included when President Obama said last month that 46 million Americans lack health coverage but excluded when, in his speech to Congress, Obama lowered the number to 30 million.
It seems clear that most of these missing millions (9.6 milllion, in fact) are non-citizens, and, in most of these cases, illegal immigrants. The remainder, I assume, are people who are enrolled in Medicaid or S-CHIP but didn’t tell the census taker. This is the so-called “Medicaid undercount,” discussed here.
So Obama counted non-citizens as “Americans [who] don’t have health coverage” in his Portsmouth, New Hampshire speech when he wanted to inflate the number of uninsured Americans so as to persuade us that there’s an enormous crisis. He then discounted them when the charge that Democrats will insure illegal aliens gained traction.
Obama and his supporters want to call this charge a lie, but the “lie” begins to look true when illegal immigrants are included among those whose situation the legislation is designed to remedy — “Americans” who don’t have health coverage. The “lie” is, in fact, substantially true because Democrats have defeated all efforts to include an enforcement mechanism that would prevent illegal aliens from being covered.
Stated more concisely, in order to make his opponents out to be lying, our slippery president must now abandon his prior false statement.

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