MEGAN MCARDLE: Where Are All The Sick People Who Can’t Get Insurance?

Approximately 300 million Americans face a serious risk of being killed in an auto accident. Which is to say, there are auto accidents, and the entire population of the country is at risk of being one of the thousands of people every year who are killed on our nation’s highways.

That statement is about as useful as a new report from HHS, presumably timed to undercut the GOP as they debate their fruitless attempt to repeal the health care bill. HHS says that millions of people–about half the country, in fact–either has, or has a loved one with, a condition that could cause them to have difficulty securing insurance.

As with the catchy opening sentence on auto deaths, this turns out to be much less interesting when you examine it. I don’t really want to know who could be conceivably affected by a problem–after all, even someone with no medical conditions now could presumably develop one. What I want to know is, how many people this problem affects.

Shockingly, not nearly as many as you’re meant to think. “I’m not saying that they don’t exist, but if they do, we should really be trying to find them. We’re not talking about a program that isn’t serving quite as many people as expected. We’re talking about a program that was supposed to serve almost 400,000 people, and is instead serving around 2% of that number. Nor have these people been turned away due to budget constraints; they don’t seem to have applied in the first place.”