Fuzzy Math

I’ve been in some genuinely massive protests in New York and Washington, DC, where crowd estimates were between 200,000 and 400,000, so I know what a crowd that size looks like and how much space it fills. So I’ve looked at the photographs Malkin has on her website that allegedly shows a crowd of “up to 2 million” in Washington, DC, for the 9/12 rally. No way. It’s hard to tell from photographs, but ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. Official estimates tend to be low, so if the teabaggers claimed 100,000 (which is very respectable, although not spectacular) I wouldn’t argue with them. But 2 million is fantasyland stuff.

See also Josh Marshall.

Update: Eyewitness account from Matt Yglesias.

Spiting Ourselves to Death

Wingnuts don’t seem to realize they’re already paying for the health care of illegal aliens. Every time an uninsured or underinsured person gets treatment in an emergency room and can’t pay the bill, the cost is added to everyone else’s bill, and to insurance premiums. As far as I know, ERs are not turning people away who can’t prove citizenship.

But, shhhh, keep this entre nous. If this gets called to wingnut attention they’ll demand that ERs get proof of citizenship before they treat anyone. None of us will dare leave home without our passports, never mind our insurance cards. Sorry about your Grandma. We couldn’t treat her because we weren’t sure she was a citizen.

After Wednesday night’s heckling the Super Weasel team of Senators Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Max Baucus (D-MT) hustled to do Rep. Joe Wilson’s bidding and close an imaginary loophole in the health care proposal. No one is proposing that any subsidies go to illegal aliens (see “Read the Bill“). But now Baucus and Conrad want to prevent illegal aliens from buying health insurance on the individual market with their own money.

Matt Yglesias:

This will have a direct cost to taxpayers since some verification mechanism will need to be put into place. It will also have an indirect cost to you and me and everyone we know—the vast majority of people, after all, aren’t undocumented immigrants but we’re all going to need to go through a citizenship check hassle before we buy health insurance. It will probably also make average premiums higher, since the exchanges will be left with a smaller risk pool and there’s no real reason to believe that the subset of undocumented immigrants who are capable of affording an unsubsidized insurance policy are below-average health risks. Last, of course, this will make the undocumented immigrant population sicker with negative public health consequences for their coworkers, friends, family, and the customers of the businesses they walk at.

There’s an old saying, “cutting off the nose to spite the face.” It refers to doing something for revenge or spitefulness that is really self-destructive. This describes the Right’s attitudes toward health care reform. Apparently it’s more important to punish illegal aliens than to provide health care for ourselves. Better to let 18,000 Americans die every year for lack of health care than to allow illegal aliens use the proposed exchanges to buy insurance with their own money. And you know if there are subsidies some illegal aliens will be able to scam the system; better to drive tens of thousands of Americans into medical bankruptcy than to let some illegal aliens have a few crumbs of benefits.

And let’s not even think about making sure agricultural and food service workers get flu shots. Epidemics are a small price to pay to be sure people aren’t getting benefits they don’t deserve. It’s a moral thing, see.

There is data showing that the enormous majority of uninsured and underinsured patients are citizens. But if some uninsured citizens really need health care, they can always move to Mexico.