Tulsi Gabbard on health care: what the evidence says · JRE #1391
SUBJECT: HEALTH CARE
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
We have, you know, almost 80 million people who are uninsured and underinsured in this country who can't get the medicine they need and who are literally driving their kid to Mexico to buy insulin
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
At the time of this 2019 interview, the U.S. Census Bureau put the number of uninsured Americans at about 27.5 million in 2018, while a February 2019 Commonwealth Fund biennial survey estimated 44 million adults were underinsured (facing high out-of-pocket costs or deductibles relative to income) that same year, up from 29 million in 2010. Added together, these figures total roughly 71 to 74 million, somewhat short of Gabbard's "almost 80 million" but in the same general range given rounding and the fact that uninsured and underinsured are measured differently and are not simply additive. Both figures reflect a real and well-documented affordability problem: underinsured adults, like the uninsured, frequently skip medications, delay care, or accrue medical debt because of cost. The specific claim about Americans driving to Mexico to buy cheaper insulin reflects a widely reported phenomenon tied to high U.S. insulin list prices, though no precise national count of such trips exists. Overall, the scale of the uninsured-plus-underinsured problem is well-supported by contemporaneous government and research data, even though the exact 80-million figure is an approximation toward the high end of what the data show.