New Orleans In the age of “big data” we are led to believe that eyes are everywhere on all of us. All is known by the all-knowing. NSA is up our nose. It goes on and on.
Yet, somehow we are losing people.
We lost more than 400,000 people on certifications under the Affordable Care Act that was four times the number we lost last year. Ostensibly these are re-verifications of citizenship status, but of course the fine print indicates that people only had 10-days to reply and, trust me on this, many found the forms and requests mystifying, and so it is more likely that people simply dropped through the crack. One immigration health expert essentially said, “Really? who in their right mind would have risked being deported by filing for health insurance? Duh.”
You know who else is disappearing? The elderly it turns out. A group called HelpAge International says old people are slipping through the cracks by the millions. In fact they put out an annual Global AgeWatch Index, and report that almost half the countries in the world – 93 of them — have zero data to offer on their elderly. Worst, unsurprisingly, many of these are the poorest countries in the world where many of us would most like to have some information, including the United Nations which has made raising living standards a huge priority over the next fifteen years. In a Times’ article they mention that “Of 54 countries in Africa…there was enough data available to include only 11 in the index.” Even for the data available of course there’s bad news in that the “gap in life expectancy at age 60 between the countries at the top and bottom has increased to 7.3 years, compared to 5.7 years in 1990.” Talk about “aging out” once you get long in the tooth you just flat out disappear it turns out. Who knew that was so easily accomplished in the age of big data.
Speaking about being invisible and besides the elderly we’re back to migrants and refugees. Running errands from the ACORN Farm someone on public radio was going on and on about whether the waves of people coming into European countries from Syria and the Middle East these days are refugees from the civil war or economic migrants. The reporter was arguing that this was a political issue, which it is, but fortunately by the end of the piece they admitted it didn’t change the fact that we had to do the right thing no matter what label was placed on it. Another commentator reminded the American listener that we needed to be careful tut-tuting since during the heart of the depression in 1930 we had forcibly removed an estimated one-million Mexicans, 60% of whom were American citizens, in a so-called “repatriation” to Mexico. These same pictures of people on trains would have been of US trains from Los Angeles and other cities to the Mexican border. This atrocity is news to many, if not most, of us.
The real solution to this invisibility problem for the elderly, poor, immigrants and others is not big data in all likelihood, but being willing to look around us in the first place.
