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qdouble

qdouble's Journal
qdouble's Journal
March 15, 2017

Dump Trumpcare and call it RIP (Republican Insurance Plan). 24K Will die a year.

The best studies on health insurance and mortality suggest 24,000 extra deaths per year if 20 million people lose their health insurance


The researchers behind this 2012 New England Journal of Medicinestudy took advantage of that variation: They compared what happened to health in three states (New York, Maine, and Arizona) that expanded Medicaid eligibility since 2000 to neighboring states without expansions, covering a period of five years before and five years after each state's expansion. They found mortality declined in places that expanded Medicaid by 20 deaths per 100,000, unlike neighboring states that didn’t expand Medicaid. Extrapolating that to the estimated 20 million who could lose health insurance with an ACA repeal, other researchers have suggested this would translate to 43,956 deaths in the US per year.

....
The best paper on this, published in 2014 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, compared the mortality rates in Massachusetts counties from 2001 to 2005 (before health reform expanded insurance) and 2007 to 2010 (after health reforms) to changes in control counties with similar demographic and economic conditions. Here, they found that the health insurance expansion prevented 320 deaths per year since it began in 2006. If that pattern holds for the ACA, the White House Council of Economic Advisers has estimated that it means 24,000 deaths per year nationwide are averted because of the ACA. (Others, including researcher Harold Pollack, have made the same calculation.)

So if we trust these “quasi-experiments,” we’re looking at somewhere between 24,000 and nearly 44,000 extra deaths per year if 20 million people lose health insurance with an Obamacare repeal


http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/14/14921962/ahca-mortality-gun-homicides

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