Here’s Barack Obama answering a question about why his socialized medicine plan won’t cover 15 million people:

Notice that he says there are no people in this country who don’t want health care, but only people who can’t afford it.  But that’s not exactly accurate.

For instance, some 500,000 people nationwide who are eligible for the SCHIP program (the current one, not the expanded behemoth the Democrats proposed) haven’t enrolled in it.  And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I routinely see articles like this one in the media about bureaucrats trying to close the “health care gap” by getting people signed up for government programs they’re eligible for.

What’s more, while politicians like Hillary and Barack like to toss around a US Census number tabulating some 45 million Americans as being uninsured, the reality is that tens of millions of those 45 million are eligible for existing government health care programs and simply have not enrolled in them.  This is a hard number to quantify, but ballpark it’s around 30 million people with another approximately 12 million having income levels above $50,000/year which is certainly enough for most people to secure their own health care.

So, even going with conservative estimates on the number of the uninsured who have insurance available to them, the reality is that most of them really are choosing to be uninsured.