Politics can produce junkscience economics/social sciences numbers that confuse public health policy and prevent proper solutions.
Gotta have a good diagnosis to develop a good treatment.
Manipulating perceptions is the job of propagandists and cargo cult science does change perceptions.
So how to make 13% unemployment (or more) into 7%
How to make 13 million uninsured into 45 million suffering with no healthcare because of cruel capitalist America.
So it’s easy, change the definitions for U3 and U6 so you change the denominator and the percentage changes to your satisfaction.
Use surveys that can be worked and tweeked. Bureau of Labor Statistics might be political? You think?
Stop counting people after they’re out for while, then even when job force participation is down, the unemployment number doesn’t reflect the real losses.
So now 92 million able bodied eligibles are out of the work force and the propaganda goes–well they’ll have more time for leisure and cultural and social activities, and let’s give them a longer unemployment benefit.
I don’t think much of Freud’s ideas about childhood sex dynamics, and the unconscious, but he said one important thing–work makes life meaningful and has a salutary effect on mental health. Idle minds, layabouts suffer the pain of an empty existence.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/05/29/3-lies-about-jobs-and-the-unemployment-rate
In the Case of people without health insurance, the Families USA and census bureau numbers inflated the numbers to get to 45 million by counting people with temporary interruptions, people with “inadequate” insurance and people who would be eligible for coverage but hadn’t applied. There was also a decided effort to ignore those capable of buying insurance who were young, healthy and couldn’t imagine paying on premiums they didn’t expect to use. Besides, hard to imagine, but self pay is actually pretty good in the honest decent American middle class who choose not to buy expensive Health Insurance because they can’t find an affordable coverage plan in an environment full of mandates and little competition on affordable packages.
In the case of talk about the uninsured, important to call it healthcare and ignore charity programs and that people can pay for healthcare out of the pocket if they refuse to buy insurance.
So first the propagandists called health insurance healthcare, meaning uninsured says you can’t get healthcare, a terrible thing in a rich America, a measure of the failure of America. Sho nuff.
Ok, ok as Joe Pesce would say–I work in an emergency department and we are obligated in hospitals across the nation, to provide medical care for anyone who comes through the door. Care to assure they have any emergency condition treated, and if we can’t do it, we can obligate a higher level of care hospital to care for them with one phone call. That’s the law. Any questions? It’s called EMTALA (Emergency Treatment and Active Labor Act) and found in the US code at 42 USC 1395 dd. I know these things because I am an emergency physician and I was an investigator for the Feds and the Texas State Health Department on investigations of violations of that law.
George Will, Columnist for WAPO, knew that the Families USA program with a complicit Census Bureau was just agit prop for a government healthcare system.
Will from 2007 at WAPO:
http://dyn.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/21/taking_a_razor_to_the_presidents_plan_97094.html&showimages=1
Here are updated essays that discuss why the sign ups don’t correspond at all with the asserted problem and proposed solution.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/the_missing_43_million.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/07/obamacare-leaves-millions-uninsured-heres-who-they-are/
What if universal insurance run by the gov is built on bad research and information and even bad numbers? Fredrick Bastiat wrote lucidly about unintended consequences. My list would include increased costs, but mediocre results, and more important, the final door shut on socialism and statist tyranny. But all with the best of intentions, based on bad information.