I'm Getting Better...

On the metro the other day, Isabel pointed out a sign for some health insurance lobbyist group.
It said something like "One out of seven Americans has no health insurance. That's not just a statistic, it's a tragedy."
The first thing Isabel noted was that it contained a comma splice.
The next thing I wanted to know was what has the rate of insurance traditionally been in this country.
It seems to me that if you were wandering around colonial America with a big sign that said "One
out of seven Americans in 2007 will have no health insurance," the colonists would first ask you what the heck health insurance was. Next, they'd say that was a pretty impressive thing, considering that we went from no one having health insurance to 6 out of 7 people having insurance in just two hundred years.
I'm not trying to romanticize the colonial health care system, nor am I saying that we shouldn't be concerned about the uninsured. I do think, however, that people have very short attention spans. Because the overwhelming majority of Americans have health insurance (if six out of seven people voted in this country, I doubt the polls could handle it), it's hard for them to imagine that throughout most of human history, health insurance didn't exist.

Comments

[Isabel]

I am happy to report that the AMA has corrected the comma splice on their web page. Scroll down for the ad, or look for it on a Metro train near you:

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/17712.html