Look at the bright side.
Many Trump of the people adversely affected by Trumpcare are probably Trump voters. If they decide to buy a new quad-runner or something instead of buying insurance, a lot of them may snuff it. Thus the population of the low-intelligence voter declines, and the more enlightened voters benefit. 
I’m failing to see how that article answers his question. That link is from 2009 anyway, and the linked article does not link to the actual AJPH study.
4th paragraph:
“The study, which analyzed data from national surveys carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), assessed death rates after taking into account education, income, and many other factors, including smoking, drinking, and obesity. It estimated that lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually.”
Don’t understand the issue of the date. Released in 2009, updating a 2002 study. Question was about 2008.
Link, because Google is apparently broken where you are…
Yes, that’s where you get the figure but Bricker was asking about Obamacare. From my reading, that article does not answer his question. ISTM you would need a study that compared before Obamacare - preferably the years just before - with after Obamacare once it had been running for a while or a study comparing the US before Obamacare with one or more countries with UHC.
UHC isn’t quite a no-brainer - you can always do better with more money and money is not unlimited - but it is a real puzzle to me why America doesn’t have it. Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good enough, as they say.
IIUC the number of uninsured in 2009 was estimated to be about 40 million. Recently the numbers of insured byObamacare is close to 20 million.
I think that then about 20,000 can be said to had been saved in a year, but higher numbers than that are more likely to be seen this year thanks to the number of insured seen now.
Doesn’t it seem blazingly obvious to everyone that if tens of millions more Americans have health coverage, it won’t prevent any deaths? Bricker is right on this one. Any correlation between seeing a doctor and not dying of disease is almost certainly a coincidence.
ETA: if anything, less insurance is a godsend for most families, because vaccines cause autism. Amirite?
Odd of this happening are low and accident plans are cheap. Lots of people will also just file bankruptcy.
Aside from the public, got the insurance companies this is an adverse selection nightmare. I would buy stock in AFLAC or their parent company right now and expect a lot of the major health insurance companies to start looking to get into another line of insurance more heavily. They can not possibly make money with this plan.
Just clarifying something because it’s important. The change to the Medicaid structure is a per-capita cap, not a block grant. I only point that out because people get really confused about the changes to Medicaid, and it’s important to understand how sneaky some of these changes can be.
Pccs can do an extremely good job of masking major cuts to the program, while Republicans will often point to how they are a “compromise” in comparison to a block grant.
So, your fundamental point is very accurate. I just wanted to correct that one issue.
In addition to the great points already made, AHCA also repeals two Medicare taxes that greatly improved the funding for the program. Then, they can say “See how bad Medicare is struggling? We need to go to vouchers!” They can’t attack Medicare directly, generally. It’s too popular.
My goodness, of course! The more people who learn the particulars, the better. It really is an appalling “replacement” plan.
We’re viewing it as a Medicaid restructuring plan, with some Obamacare tweaks (all for the worse).
And of course it does nothing to address the underlying fundamental problem with the delivery of health care to US citizens: Controlling costs. Not really a big surprise, considering how many people and corporations profit from it. Will people never see this?
Republicans are so ideologically bound up right now in attacking anything related to Obama, that I’m surprised they didn’t go after the payment reforms of the ACA. I’m glad they aren’t targeting those.
But you’re right. This is a deck chair rearrangement.
Yeah but who wants poor parts? I want rich young parts.
I hear that Keith Richards only accepts young Mormon parts that have known no chemistry stronger than Dr. Pepper. And he would know!
This is getting into GD territory, but I’ll answer anyway. We don’t have UHC because it’s Republican dogma that the free market will produce the best and most cost effective health system in the world. Despite massive evidence to the contrary.
Note that I said this is a GD question, so if anyone wants to argue it, please open a thread over there.
Of course some of them oppose it. There’s a remarkable reflection here of the great ideological divide. Some Democrats opposed Obamacare because it didn’t go far enough to provide health care for everyone. Some Republicans oppose Trumpcare because it doesn’t go far enough to withhold health care from enough people. It’s a startling difference in how one regards one’s fellow man.
You don’t need a study, you just need to know that Obamacare cut the number of uninsured in half. If you have half the number of uninsured you’ll have half the number of deaths from lack of health insurance as a category of preventable deaths. GIGO provided the numbers in #45, and Ravenman provided the necessary sarcasm in the post after that.
Why is it a puzzle? See my first response above. Republicans have been a dominant political force and are currently in control of pretty much everything, and Republicans are in the business of limiting health care to those able and willing to pay market price, the same way that the wondrous free market limits the availability of Mercedes cars and private jets to those who can afford them. To them it’s all the same.
As a side note, the “more money” argument is a red herring. It might seem that adding millions of Americans to the health care system would cost proportionately more – it’s just math, right? No, it isn’t. There’s a reason that health care costs so much less in other countries. Turns out, it costs a truly enormous amount of money to process and adjudicate claims, risk-rate clients and manage all the diverse policies, try to cut claims costs, weasel out of claims, and generally try to deny health care. It’s actually a lot cheaper to just cover everybody and automatically pay for their health care at set rates without massive arguments and paperwork each and every time.
The facts cited so far fail to back up that statement.
Win-win for them. Screw the poor; enrich the rich; and still blame it on Obama.
Sure, but that will not actually fix the US health care system’s incredibly high costs. One of the main drivers in our high costs is our incredibly poor record of social spending, so dealing with social determinants, which in most other countries would be handled through different spending channels, in the US is handled (if at all) through health care spending. By its nature, health care costs more to do the same job as most other types of spending.
It’s really more like a Potemkin Obamacare: a cardboard façade made to look like Obamacare but that would be basically useless in terms of health coverage.
But then, being useful in terms of health coverage isn’t exactly a GOP goal.