Posted on 02/12/2010 8:17:12 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It's a contentious question, but curiously, one that doesn't get debated nearly as fiercely as things like "how many uninsured people are there?" I find that surprising, because after all, we don't necessarily care whether people are marked by some survey as "insured" or "uninsured"; we care whether there is preventable suffering in the world.
But it turns out to be really hard to determine how many people die without insurance, which is the subject of this month's column. The most recent available study, which also had the largest sample and controlled for the most variables, found no effect at all--a result which surprised the hell out of its author, a former Clinton advisor. Other studies say the number is in the tens of thousands.
The left is predictably fond of the study which got the largest number, 45,000 a year. Unfortunately, its authors are political advocates for a single-payer system, who also helped author the notorious studies on medical bankruptcies. Those studies are very shoddily done, with parameters that somehow always conspire to produce the maximum possible number. In the first study, they set an absurdly low threshhold for what constituted a "medical bankruptcy". In the second, they chose 2006, the year after the 2005 bankruptcy reform act had driven an unprecedented spike in filings. It seems pretty likely that medical bankruptcies were bound to be overrepresented in 2006, since most financial events are easier to see coming than illnesses. But even if you disagree--and the authors offered an incredibly wan explanation of why they did--it's very clear that the people who filed in 2006 were not going to be a representative sample of bankruptcies in a normal year. I can't imagine why you would choose to study 2006 unless you were looking for biased results.
(Excerpt) Read more at meganmcardle.theatlantic.com ...
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The right, meanwhile, shuns the subject like the plague. It will not do anyone's career any good to be attached to an argument that sounds like the health care equivalent of "let them eat cake".
So allow me, maybe, to be the first. I'm afraid I'm not confident about any number. All of these studies suffer from unobserved variable bias, which is to say, the uninsured are not like the rest of us. (The long term uninsured, I mean; the short term uninsured are not a large problem for society). There are all sorts of reasons that people end up uninsured, but most of them are correlated with much poorer health outcomes, and only some of them end up recorded in our surveys.
How many people are flatly refused medical care?
one thing worth remembering: everyone dies
Some questions :
1) How likely is it that the poor who are sick will die from lack of treatment
2) If you were poor in the USA and poor in say, Canada, who would likely get better treatment when sick ?
Leaving off the question mark
(”How Many People Die From Lack of Health Insurance”)
inplies that many people do die for this reason.
How many people die even though they have health care?
How many people die from being unemployed ?
The Atlantic. I stopped there.
How many people died from Communism in the 20th Century?
I would bet more people die from medical errors than not going in at all.
How many people died in America from abortion since Roe v. Wade?
How many die with health insurance?
A. 100million dead
None.
A. 50million dead
So it is NOT about number of people dead. This is about advancing socialism.
“How many people die even though they have health care?”
All of them . . . eventually. For some strange reason it does not matter whether or not you have health care or health insurance. You die anyway.
Oh well.
Megan McArdle is OK
How many are bankrupted by medical costs, even with insurance?
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