Fuzzy math from Allen Icet

During tonight's budget debate in the House, Budget Chair Allen Icet cited a statistic stating that 21% of Missouri's residents are covered by Medicaid. At the time, Icet was arguing that the state's existing health care programs were "fairly generous." 

There appears to be just one minor problem: the Medicaid statistics cited by Icet were from 2005, which he acknowledged at the time.* 

You may recall that in 2005, former Governor Blunt and the Republican legislature made sweeping Medicaid cuts which eliminated coverage for more than 100,000 people and reduced benefits for hundreds of thousands of other low-income adults.

I assume Icet remembers this.

If Icet had looked at more recent data -- maybe some data collected  after the cuts went into effect -- he'd see that just 1 out of 7 Missourians are covered by Medicaid.  This works out to around 14% of the population, instead of 21%.

Oops.

Note: The chart above is from Missouri Medicaid Basics, Winter 2009, by the Missouri Foundation for Health.

*No one called him on it at the time, but I jotted down his claim as something to check when I got in front of a computer.