PA. Repubs: Providing Health Insurance Will Hurt Health of Poor People; Won't let hospitals speak

[JPZenger]

3. Here's info on the study being used to attack Obamacare and Medical Assistance

http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/06/09/wash-times-pushes-flawed-study-on-medicaid-to-a/180449

The link has information on a study that is being mis-used across the country to try to stop any expansion of medical assistance. The study found poor health results after surgery for people on Medicaid. The Repubs are now claiming that is it better for people to have no insurance than to be on Medicaid. Let us also remember that the city and public hospitals that receive the higher numbers of Medicaid patients often are underfunded.

Excerpt from the study authors' postscript:

"Another possible explanation for the differences we observed among payer groups is the possibility of incomplete risk adjustment due to the presence of co-morbidities that are either partially or unaccounted for in our analyses...Several explanations for inherent differences in payer populations have been suggested. Factors including decreased access to health care, language barriers, level of education, poor nutrition, and compromised health maintenance have all been suggested.

.... NIS is a large, administrative database, and the potential for unrecognized miscoding among diagnostic and procedure codes as well as variations in the nature of coded complications must be considered. Further, we are only able to comment on short-term outcomes as data collected for NIS reflects a patient's inpatient admission. Consequently, the results reported herein may underestimate true perioperative mortality and morbidity rates that may have occurred following the patient's discharge.

....For example, the proportion of Medicaid patients may be artificially inflated due to the fact that normally Uninsured patients may garner Medicaid coverage during a given hospital admission.... Due to the constraints of NIS data points, we are unable to include adjustments for other well-established surgical risk factors such as low preoperative albumin levels or poor nutrition status. However, upon sensitivity analyses our statistical models proved resilient to the presence of a potentially unmeasured confounder"