Wednesday, June 20, 2012

There They Go Again…

The liberal advocacy group Families USA is out with a “study” today purporting to tally the number of individuals who died due to a lack of health coverage from 2005 to 2010.  Today’s report extrapolates from a 2002 Institute of Medicine study that claimed about 18,000 individuals died due to lack of health insurance.

There’s just one problem with the IOM study – it has since been challenged and repudiated as inaccurate.  A 2009 paper by Richard Kronick – himself a former Clinton Administration official – included the following conclusions:

Adjusted for demographic, health status, and health behavior characteristics, the risk of subsequent mortality is no different for uninsured respondents than for those covered by employer-sponsored group insurance at baseline….The Institute of Medicine’s estimate that lack of insurance leads to 18,000 excess deaths each year is almost certainly incorrect…There is little evidence to suggest that extending insurance coverage to all adults would have a large effect on the number of deaths in the United States.

And it’s not just Kronick who agrees with this analysis.  Here’s Brookings Institution scholar, and noted liberal, Henry Aaron, in an interview with Politifact on the links (if any) between the uninsured and death totals:

“I found his reasoning compelling,” said Aaron, himself a member of the Institute of Medicine. “In fact, after listening to his presentation, I had a hard time believing that the IOM had done what they had done.”  In interviews, Aaron and other health care scholars agreed with Kronick that uninsured and insured Americans differ in many ways other than their insurance status.  “To estimate the impact of the lack of insurance on mortality rates, one has to control statistically for all of those differences,” Aaron said.  That, he added, is exactly what Kronick has sought to do so.

So an intellectually rigorous analysis by one Democrat – supported as being compelling and thoughtful by other Democrats – gets ignored by a partisan liberal interest group, because it would take away their likely pre-determined conclusion that Obamacare will reduce death rates.  As The Gipper himself stated, there they go again