With the deadline looming for people to have health care coverage to avoid any penalties from the government, the spotlight has returned to the Affordable Care Act. 

Recently, the Florida Chamber of Commerce issued a report about "Smarter Healthcare Coverage in Florida."  In their seven-point plan, the Chamber had this to say about health care coverage and Florida:

"Insured Floridians pay about $2,000 for every hospital stay to cover the cost of the uninsured."

PolitiFact decided to see if the Chamber's claim was accurate, and reporter Joshua Gillin says that the chamber's claim rates HALF TRUE. Gillin says that while the numbers based on estimated data are calculated correctly, there are many assumptions that the chamber makes to get these numbers.

"What the Chamber of Commerce did was to develop a way to take numbers that they could track down and make statewide projections," Gillin said. "The Chamber took an unnamed urban hospital ... those are their words, by the way, an 'urban' hospital ... and the took the number of uninsured patients and divided it by the number of patients who did have insurance. The chamber, though, readily admits that they took the numbers and developed a range between $1,700 and $2,300 per hospital visit."

Gillin said that the problem with all of this is that those numbers may or may not be accurate. 

"We contacted about a half-dozen state and private agencies to see whether or not this was true," Gillin said. "They all told us that they don't actually keep statistics like that, and that means that the chamber is relying on a lot of estimates to support their numbers."

In the end, Gillin said that the overall message put out by the Florida Chamber of Commerce - that the insured pay for the uninsured - is generally accurate. But because of a lack of reliable data, there's no way to say whether the chamber's claim regarding cost is accurate or even verifiable, which leads to PolitiFact rating the claim HALF TRUE.

 

SOURCES: Is $2,000 your share of the cost for the uninsured?