Originally Posted by Blackhawk

The above points out how careful you must be for taking at face value what you here in the media, especially NPR. For example, in addition to hearing "The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer", we often hear that there are 48,000,000 uninsured Americans, and we take this as the truth as we hear it on NPR,CBS, NBS, ABC and FOX ALL the time. So I went back and hunted down the question that was asked to get this number.
The question asked by the Current Population Survey (CPS), was not: "Are you currently without insurance."
The question asked WAS: "In the past 12 months ending two months ago, have you ever been without health insurance."
First, it was found that many answered this question incorrectly (people answered negative when they had health insurance through someone else).
Second, since we are talking about a long time from (12 months), many people who anwer this question correctly currently have insurance. It was found that this number is over stated by at least a factor of 2. So when you hear numbers thrown around on the TV and radio, don't just believe them. Find out where they came from.