Does Having Health Insurance Save Lives? Or Why The Press Is Clueless About How Healthcare Works

"Never attribute to malice what can adequately explain the inability ."

- Napoleon Bonaparte

A recent study in Oregon, made ​​headlines by demonstrating decreased mortality rate for Medicaid patients in relation to the uninsured. However, those who actually read the study were more impressed by the relatively small impact of such insurance napravio.Zbunjujući is a fact that has health insurance of any kind makes very little difference in mortality. Although people with some kind of insurance to feel better about their health, more concrete measures to improve missing. Megan McArdle discusses the issue at great length, and stresses that the political prejudices of writers seems to be the most important factor in how data are interpreted.

The most important finding of this study show that journalists have no idea about how medical care is actually provided. People without insurance get the health and quality is often very different from the rich and slavne.Neosiguran go to emergency rooms, and treated, regardless of their ability to pay. Patients without coverage get their gallbladders removed, they treat inflammation of the lungs, their heart stents placed. Hospitals in this country do not distract acutely ill persons, and services performed by the same doctors who treated insured pacijenti.Siromašni can not get immediate hip replacement, twenty injections for back pain, or 50 episodes of psychotherapy for their depression, but they do not die on the streets. Furthermore, they are not treated or subjected to too many marginally effective therapies or dangerous for the ambiguous complaints. Even those with chronic medical problems such as cancer or AIDS, and eventually get Medicaid coverage, and receive him.

In addition, I have said earlier, a lot of "preventive" medicine is precijenjena.Broj lives saved from cancer screening is relatively small. Even untreated high blood pressure and cholesterol do not kill many people before Medicare eligibility. Most serious health problems will soon come to light, causing the patient to the health care system, usually through the emergency.

This safety net for the uninsured or did not understand or ignore the study's authors, the press, and our političari.Skrb is strange, inconsistent, and sometimes substandard, but the sick are not barred from emergency rooms. These services are provided free of those very doctors who are universally castigated for their greed and avarice. (Up to 20 percent of protection given I was not compensated). The current system of subsidizing this care through higher charges for people with real insurance or Medicare, and additional capacity in the health care system.

Therefore, the claims of the uninsured are fully able to get medical care is simply not true. The media, politicians, and reformers who rail about the team can not be malicious or incompetent, but certainly are clueless.