January 9, 2013

Good News for Single Payer, Bad News for Insurance Companies

http://www.singlepayeraction.org/blog/?p=3562

This has to be good news for the future of single payer.

And bad news for insurance companies.

Anti-insurance company animus is growing in the USA — especially among young people.

A recent national poll found that fully 59 percent of respondents said they would be inclined to favor the individual in civil litigation that pitted an individual against an insurance company.

But for respondents in the youngest age category — individuals 18 to 29 — fully 71 percent said that they would be inclined to favor the individual over the insurance company.

That’s 15 percent higher than among all adults age 30 or over.

January 6, 2013

Our Absurd Fear of Fat

Our Absurd Fear of Fat
Paul Campos

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/opinion/our-imaginary-weight-problem.html

To put some flesh on these statistical bones, the study found a 6 percent decrease in mortality risk among people classified as overweight and a 5 percent decrease in people classified as Grade 1 obese, the lowest level (most of the obese fall in this category). This means that average-height women — 5 feet 4 inches — who weigh between 108 and 145 pounds have a higher mortality risk than average-height women who weigh between 146 and 203 pounds. For average-height men — 5 feet 10 inches — those who weigh between 129 and 174 pounds have a higher mortality risk than those who weigh between 175 and 243 pounds.

Now, if we were to employ the logic of our public health authorities, who treat any correlation between weight and increased mortality risk as a good reason to encourage people to try to modify their weight, we ought to be telling the 75 million American adults currently occupying the government’s “healthy weight” category to put on some pounds, so they can move into the lower risk, higher-weight categories.

In reality, of course, it would be nonsensical to tell so-called normal-weight people to try to become heavier to lower their mortality risk. Such advice would ignore the fact that tiny variations in relative risk in observational studies provide no scientific basis for concluding either that those variations are causally related to the variable in question or that this risk would change if the variable were altered.

This is because observational studies merely record statistical correlations: we don’t know to what extent, if any, the slight decrease in mortality risk observed among people defined as overweight or moderately obese is caused by higher weight or by other factors. Similarly, we don’t know whether the small increase in mortality risk observed among very obese people is caused by their weight or by any number of other factors, including lower socioeconomic status, dieting and the weight cycling that accompanies it, social discrimination and stigma, or stress

January 3, 2013

Canada’s health costs for seniors rising slowly, points way to Medicare solvency

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2012/october/canada%E2%80%99s-health-costs-for-seniors-rising-slowly-points-way-to-medicare-solvency-ar

Archives of Internal Medicine article

Researchers find the U.S. could have saved more than $2.15 trillion on Medicare since 1980 had it employed cost-saving measures similar to Canada's

A study published in today’s Archives of Internal Medicine finds that per capita Medicare spending on the elderly has grown nearly three times faster in the United States than in Canada since 1980. (Canada’s program, which covers all Canadians, not just the elderly, is also called Medicare.) Costs grew more slowly in Canada despite a 1984 law banning co-payments and deductibles.

In the first study of its kind, Dr. David U. Himmelstein and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professors at the City University of New York’s School of Public Health, analyzed decades of detailed Medicare spending data for persons aged 65 and older in the U.S. and Canada.