Seriously–for as good as he is at staging events, he’s turning into Sarah Palin.
The Kaiser Foundation tracks the non-elderly uninsured population in Illinois as 15% of the non-elderly population which means about 1.7 million uninsured and another 1.6 million or so on public insurance already. By Mark Kirk’s claim then there are over 1.4 million or so undocumented immigrants and those who can afford or don’t want insurance.
How stupid is Mark Kirk? Really, he seems to get a pass for ridiculous statements such as his comments in China, but what it’s really shaping up to be is that Mark Kirk doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.
Look at Cheryl Burton’s reaction when Charles Thomas quotes Kirk on the 8 million thing. She just accepts the comment as fact — hook, line and sinker.
The question isn’t “How stupid is Mark Kirk?”
It’s “How often will the media give him a pass on these things because they don’t know any better themselves?”
That whole segment was full of disinformation, not the least of which were Kirk’s comments about how evil and sinister “European-style care” is… Which bill being debated in Congress even includes anything remotely like “European-style care”? And yet Charles Thomas breezes right along.
The ‘8 million’ uninsured quote comes from a 2003 health-care industry funded (read: Blue Cross) study which states that there were’8 million chronically uninsured’ in the US. After all these years its still a bitter pill to watch industry-generated propaganda make it onto the news and sold to us as ‘fact.’ Blue Cross and all insurance companies benefit from minimizing the health care crisis so as to shift the debate away from its core issues.