Dying Due to no Health Insurance?
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 By Marc KilmerLeft-wing Families USA put out a report yesterday claiming that two Ohioans die every day from a lack of health insurance. It is based on an Urban Institute Report that was in turn based on an old Institute for Medicine report that said 18,000 people die every year from lack of insurance. Since Families USA is promoting third-hand research, that should give people pause from blindly accepting its conclusions.
There are other reasons to take its report at face value. For one, there are doubts about the accuracy of the original Institutes for Medicine report. As Dr. Nathan Grazer puts it in his book, The Cure:
…the institute’s number doesn’t reflect the result of a study. In fact, their original report on the uninsure didn’t mention the figure. It was only later, when the orgainization called for universal health care, that they decided to provide an ”estimate.” The number 18,000 is based on various small studies suggesting poorer clinical outcomes when people lack insurance.
Most of these studies are not clear-cut….Health outcomes are influenced by complex variables, such as socioeconomic status, but almost none of the commony quoted studies makes the necessary adjustments.
Furthermore, the Families USA report treats the uninsured as if they are all one group of people. As I’ve discussed before, there are a number of different populations that make up the uninsured: those who cannot afford insurance, those who can afford insurance but who choose not to buy it, and — the largest group — those who are only temporarily without insurance (up to two-thirds of the uninsured have insurance for part of the year).
In short, Families USA has nothing solid upon which to base their alarmist report. But don’t expect to see the media actually looking into the assumptions supporting the report. They just dutifully report this inaccurate information and leave the impression that we have some sort of “uninsured crisis.”
Tags: Health care
