Bernie Sanders on healthcare: what the evidence says · JRE #2341

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

The 85 million figure traces to the Commonwealth Fund's 2022 Biennial Health Insurance Survey, which estimated that 43 percent of U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 (roughly 85 million of about 197 million) were inadequately insured. That combined category is not the number of uninsured: it lumps together people who were uninsured (about 9 percent), people who had a gap in coverage during the year (about 11 percent), and people insured all year but underinsured because of high out-of-pocket costs (about 23 percent). FactCheck.org notes that the number actually uninsured was far smaller, roughly 27.2 million (8.3 percent of the population) per the Census Bureau, and that the 85 million total even includes about 21.6 million who were insured at the time of the survey. So the underlying source exists, but characterizing 85 million as uninsured (or even uninsured or underinsured at a single point in time) overstates the coverage gap. This claim is misleading.