How Many People Die From Lack of Health Insurance?

The Atlantic ^ | 02/11/2010 | Megan McCardle

[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.

[SeekAndFind]

To balance what she said, here's what she says about those on the right, and then what she concludes :

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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.

[a fool in paradise]

How many people are flatly refused medical care?

[babble-on]

one thing worth remembering: everyone dies

[SeekAndFind]

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 ?

[Notwithstanding]

Leaving off the question mark
(”How Many People Die From Lack of Health Insurance”)
inplies that many people do die for this reason.

[Man50D]

How many people die even though they have health care?

[a fool in paradise]

100% of people who went to a hospital at least once in their lives eventually died, despite any health regiment changes, medicine treatments, or surgeries tried.

[Nonstatist]

How many people die from being unemployed ?

[WakeUpAndVote]

The Atlantic. I stopped there.

[SeekAndFind]

How many people are flatly refused medical care?

That's a good question, but let me extend the question further --- Danny Williams, Premier of Newfoundland in Canada, was able, by virtue of his wealth to get the best treatment in a US hospital. If one were poor in the USA, and he had Danny Williams, heart condition, will he be given the same medical treatment ? Or will he be refused ?

[a fool in paradise]

How many people died from Communism in the 20th Century?

[WOBBLY BOB]

I would bet more people die from medical errors than not going in at all.

[a fool in paradise]

How many people died in America from abortion since Roe v. Wade?

[depressed in 06]

How many die with health insurance?

[a fool in paradise]

A. 100million dead

[sport]

None.

[a fool in paradise]

A. 50million dead

So it is NOT about number of people dead. This is about advancing socialism.

[No Truce With Kings]

“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.

[babble-on]

Megan McArdle is OK

[Wolfie]

How many are bankrupted by medical costs, even with insurance?