That’s an eyebrow raising claim indeed. If true, that means the entire medical profession is an enormous fraud, and we’re pissing trillions of dollars away on healthcare to no good effect.
I presume that total US death rates are compiled every year. ACA has been around since 2010. Show me that the US death rate has decreased significantly (statistically) more in the last 6 years than it has in the average 6 years period previously (let’s limit that to 1990 and above to make it a reasonably modern period).
50,000 deaths is just statistical noise, just like the number of US troops killed in Vietnam.
Why were we so worried about soldier dying in wars, when it’s really just statistical noise?
It is a bit hard to see results of a healthcare policy, especially about preventative measures, over only 6-7 years. Many medical issues take quite a while to develop, and preventing them in the first place will may not see results for a good portion of someone’s lifetime. For instance, I quit smoking about 5 years ago, and yet, my life span has not been extended at all, I am still exactly as old as I would have been. It will not be for another couple of decades for that decision to make a difference.
Same as healthcare and preventive health. Not seeing immediate results should not be surprising, at least, not to anyone who actually understands how medical conditions develop.
But, for those who think that preventive care doesn’t do anything, do you have any idea what the difference is in dealing with a small tumor and stage IV cancer? Anyone know what the difference is between the cost of a measles vaccine, and the cost of treating a measles outbreak?
I’ll absolutely agree that there is overtesting in the field, and not all preventative care is beneficial, but to then go ahead and say that no preventive care is beneficial is not just against medical knowledge, but basic common sense.
As I mentioned previously, there is no reason to suspect that the effects of the ACA could be isolated from everything else going on in society that may be reflected in overall death statistics.
Do you understand this?
So then no proof?
Wow, you got us!
So cancelling health insurance for poor people could make them better off, it could make them worse off, no way to tell without running a double blind experiment.
It’s all a big fraud. The poor could be better off or worse off without health care, you don’t know. Who told you the poor needed health care? Doctors? Of course Doctors say that, they would, wouldn’t they?
Anyone gathering those statistics should totally leave out deaths from places that impeded the implementation of the ACA, those deaths are not on the ACA’s watch!
Look, even in a hypothetical scenario in which deaths dropped by some huge margin between 2013 and 2015 (note that you seem very confused on when the ACA provisions went into effect), and life expectancy jumped during those same years, I would be the very first to say that people should not attribute the positive outcomes to the ACA.
There are a million things going on in society that causes death rates to go up or down. Smoking is going down, but the population is aging. Cars are getting safer but opioid abuse is getting worse. Attributing all changes in national death rates to one factor – insurance coverage – is the textbook definition of an extremely facile argument.
“For three years, an incredibly nerdy—but consequential—debate has raged among health policy researchers regarding Medicaid, America’s government-run health-care program for the poor. Piles of studies have shown that people on Medicaid have health outcomes that are no better, and often worse, than those with no insurance at all. But supporters of Obamacare were cheered in 2011 when a lone study, out of Oregon, purported to show that Medicaid was better than being uninsured. Yesterday, however, the authors of the Oregon study published their updated, two-year results, finding that** Medicaid “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes.”** The result calls into question the $450 billion a year we spend on Medicaid, and the fact that Obamacare throws 11 million more Americans into this broken program.”
Bolding mine.
At least you’ve moved on from the terrible argument that you’ve been beating to death for the last couple pages.
Not only is it a change, it’s actually an argument that is relevant to the subject at hand!
He hasn’t quite convinced me that medical care is bad for people’s health yet though. But if he did then that would be very compelling!
There is also evidence that expanding Medicaid as ACA did worsens the overall health outcomes for the whole population:
“Even though TennCare failed to control costs, if the increased rates of insurance coverage translated into improved health outcomes for the targeted population, then it may be possible to call the program a success. Of course, health insurance coverage is quite different from access to quality health care. The evidence on quality of health improvement would be found in a comparison of health outcomes for Tennesseans to those of individuals in similar states that did not vastly expand their Medicaid programs. A Heritage Foundation analysis contrasted trends in the mortality rates in Tennessee before and after TennCare with the eight states that border Tennessee: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia.
…
The essence of the mortality rate trends is that Tennessee compared much less favorably to the surrounding states after the enactment of TennCare than before its enactment. As the figures show, the change in Tennessee’s mortality rate between 1990 and 1994 mirrored what was going on in the region with minor fluctuation. After the enactment of TennCare when surrounding states were experiencing robust declines in their mortality rates, the decline in Tennessee was much more modest. In the four years following TennCare, the average decline in mortality rates in the surrounding states was 5.2 percent compared to a 2.1 percent decline in Tennessee.”
So there were improved health outcomes due to the increased coverage, but “health insurance coverage is quite different from access to quality health care” (hinting that the region just had crappy doctors or something), so other places where other unspecified things were happening ended up doing yet better.
And thus by removing health insurance from people all over the place, even in places with good doctors, everyone will be healthy forever!
(Still though, stay on this line of attack. It’s on topic at least.)
If the Heritage analysis simply looked at overall mortality rates in several states, before and after Medicaid expansion, they are likely making the exact same fundamental mistake that you have now returned to: it is not reasonable to attribute overall mortality rates to a single cause.
Let me provide a different scenario to illustrate the absurdty of this line of argument. In July 2009, the Federal minimum wage went up for the first time in many years. The next three quarters of growth in the United States were very high, greater than 3% and nearing 4% each quarter.
Therefore, we can be assured that raising the minimum wage resulted in high economic growth.
You misread it.
“if the increased rates of insurance coverage translated into improved health outcomes for the targeted population, then it may be possible to call the program a succes”
does not equal
“there were improved health outcomes due to the increased coverage”.
They looked at the overall mortality rate in Tennessee compared to the surrounding states.
If you could compare the increased-minimum-wage region’s growth to similar surrounding regions’ growth that had no increased minimum wage, you’d be able to show that, yes.
Actually, the part I was reading was “the average decline in mortality rates in the surrounding states was 5.2 percent compared to a 2.1 percent decline in Tennessee.”
I mean, yes, the article implied that there were no improved health outcomes in Tennessee, and that was spectacularly dishonest of them.
Health Care: bad for poor people. Bad for America.
The article “implied” (well, outright stated) that without the increased Medicaid coverage, the states surrounding Tennessee showed significantly better improvements in their mortality rates than Tennessee did.
Which implies that Tennessee would have gotten better improvements in their mortality rates if they did not expand their Medicaid program, yes.
No, no it doesn’t imply that, and the article itself implies that the problem wasn’t with the increase in medicare. It was, according to their speculation, due to a lack of good health care providers. Right there in the part you quoted.