Three of the most powerful advocacy groups in the country spent last week spearheading an unprecedented $8 million campaign to persuade Americans to take yet another step down the road to a single-payer health-care system. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Families USA and the Commonwealth Fund were the main forces behind “Cover the Uninsured Week” — an intense effort to turn Medicare into something resembling Canada’s antiquated and crumbling health-care system.

No one argues that America’s uninsured population is not a major social issue, but by exaggerating and misrepresenting the causes of being uninsured, the Cover the Uninsured propaganda blitz seems designed to advance the thread-bare statist agenda of price controls, insurance mandates — expanding Medicaid, rather than actually helping the uninsured who are truly needy.

Families USA’s accompanying 53-page study claims an eye-popping 74.7 million people under the age of 65 in the United States went uninsured “for all or part of a two-year period from 2001 to 2002.” Ron Pollack, the head of Families USA, uses this number to call for “real and meaningful action to expand health coverage.”

But Pollack’s latest estimate of the number of uninsured is meaningless. Anyone who was uninsured even briefly during this two-year period gets added to the “uninsured” population. It’s like calling “unemployed” anyone who took a week or month off between jobs, or tagging as “homeless” anyone who moved from one house to another. Simply removing the 26.2 million people who were uninsured only for one to five months reduces the uninsured figure to 48.5 million.

The more commonly cited estimate of the number of people without insurance for some length of time in a single year is 41 million. Yet even this number is suspect because emerging studies indicate about half those people were uninsured for a period of only three months or so, with the balance being chronically uninsured because of medical conditions, economic conditions, or by voluntarily choosing to be self-insured.

A current report by The Blue Cross Blue Shield Assn. finds that more than 14 million of the 41 million uninsured are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan, but have not enrolled. More than 15 million have incomes of $50,000 or more and would purchase insurance if they thought it valuable, but choose not to. The fastest growing population of uninsured people earns an income of $75,000 or more.

According to the Blue Cross study, 5.7 million are short-term insured, such as recent college graduates or people between jobs. The report also indicates 5.2 million uninsured are in three states with a high number of illegal immigrants: California, Texas and New York.

Do these numbers suggest the need for expanding Medicaid to middle-income families, imposing new regulations on health insurers, or violating the patent protections of drug manufacturers … all reforms advocated by the groups responsible for the “Cover the Uninsured” campaign? Hardly.

The ensuing benefit and procedural mandates would waste billions of dollars solving the wrong problem and would most likely miss the very population needing the most help. Just as important, they would undermine a private health insurance marketplace that offers the best hope of solving the real problems afflicting the nation’s health care finance and delivery system.

There are four viable solutions to the uninsured problem: Expanding high-risk health insurance pools for the medically uninsurable; repealing coverage mandates that encourage people to go without insurance; making medical savings accounts permanent and more flexible; and passing individual tax credits for the uninsured and unemployed.

Unfortunately, the powers behind “Cover the Uninsured Week” oppose each of these reforms. And fortunately, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Sen. John Breaux, D-La., are pushing for legislation that will give uninsured consumers real choice by providing them incentives to obtain health-care coverage through the private sector. With the war on international terrorism depleting the federal budget, the private sector is by far the most cost-effective way to provide health-care coverage for the nation’s uninsured — whatever their numbers.

By Conrad F. Meier is managing editor of Health Care News, a publication of The Heartland Institute.