MSNBC: The Place for Made-Up Numbers of Uninsured Women

Update below the fold.

This is just a small entry, a blog-lette, if you will.  Because I happened to have seen this bit of broadcast flapdoodle live, which you now have before you at right (with the audio available here).

On this morning's MSNBC News Live, co-host Angela Burt-Murray - the Editor-in-Chief of Essence magazine -uncorks this absolutely wild pitch to Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-Md):

Recently you released a report on women and health care, and taking a look at the very real issue that families are facing we have more than 64 million women who have lost health care due to loss of job or a spouse that has lost a job.  How do you see the Administration's plan being more able to effectively address this issue for women and children in this country?

64 million?  Just women?

We have repeatedly documented that the oft-cited 46 million people - men and women - without insurance is completely bogus.  But as you will find at the link's destination, the media's number on this vacillates wildly.

As exhibited by Ms. Burt-Murray here.  Though hers may be the biggest stretch of all.  As the media get more desperate, as they see the national popularity for the government takeover of medicine they favor continue to tank, they get more desperate - and so do their claims.

Ms. Burt-Murray's whopper is the "very real issue" of 64 million women who have allegedly lost their insurance due to their losing their jobs.  Statistically, that would mean that there are also roughly 64 million men without health insurance (unless Ms. Burt-Murray is claiming the scourge of uninsurance to be exclusively a women's issue, which would be a whole other area of bizarreness). 

So the new media high-water mark for fabrications of the uninsured in America is now 128 million.  Just of people who lost their insurance along with their gig, which means Ms. Burt-Murray's "very real" fake number is even higher than that. 

Ms. Burt-Murray's most serious "very real issue," it would appear, is with numbers and counting.  That and her "very real issue" can not possibly be addressed by the Administration's plan, because the Administration does not have one.

Update: The Congressional study to which she referes begins thusly:

The status-quo health insurance system is serving women poorly. An estimated 64 million women lack adequate health insurance. Over half of all medical bankruptcies are filed by female-headed households. For too many women and their families today, quality, affordable health care is out of reach.

Which means the most daunting "very real issue" facing Ms. Burt-Murray is in fact reading comprehension.  Or uncontrollable hallucinations.

Additionally, as pointed out by our intrepid intern Mike Sargent: Were 64 million women recently shed from the job rolls as Ms. Burt-Murray alleges, that alone would represent 11% of the entire population of the United States losing their gigs, including the children and elderly who aren't considered for unemployment calculation purposes. 

The current unemployment percentage - of eligible citizens, not babies and nonagenarians - is less than 10%.

Thank goodness Ms. Burt-Murray is co-hosting a national news program, to bring us just this kind of incisive reporting.