Say Anything Blog

I posted about this study earlier today noting that the chief researcher behind it works for a single payer health care advocacy group.  But now there comes to light some facts about this study that go beyond a mere bias.  Apparently, participants in the study were interviewed once.  They were asked if they had health insurance.  If they said no and they died at some point in the future their death is attributed to a lack of insurance.

I don’t think I need to tell you that sort of methodology is what blogging professionals like myself like to call “crap.”

“Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing,” Mr. Obama said in his Sept. 9 address. “Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it most. And more will die as a result. We know these things to be true.”

Mr. Milloy believes the study will give Mr. Obama more specific numbers to use in order to ramp up public support for his plan.

“They are trying to create these factoids that they can beat opponents over the head with,” Mr. Milloy said. “They interviewed 9,000 people between 1988 and 1994 and asked, ‘Do you have health insurance?’ and if you die at some point in the future, they assume your death was caused by the fact you didn’t have insurance during that time you were interviewed.”

“That kind of stuff is classic junk science,” Mr. Milloy added.

John C. Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, agreed that the study was flawed. “The subjects were interviewed only once and the study tries to link their insurance status at that time to mortality a decade later. Yet over the period, the authors have no idea whether subjects were insured or uninsured, what kind of medical care they received, or even cause of death,” he said in a statement.

Just to put that into perspective, if you told the researchers behind this study that you didn’t have health insurance and five years later you got ran over by a car they’d say you died because you didn’t have insurance.  Not, you know, because you got ran over by a car.

If you told the researchers behind this study that you didn’t have insurance but then five years later got insurance but died because you got ran over by a car they’d still say you died because you didn’t have insurance.

But I’m sure that won’t matter to liberals like North Dakota state Senator Tim Mathern who according to his Twitter feed will be citing this study to his fellow Democrats at a policy meeting today so they can all sit around and nod sadly at the great injustice of our current way of doing health care.  This isn’t about fact, for them.  It’s about emotion.

And this study with its statistics fills their need for emotional fodder for this debate.  Even if it’s entirely divorced from reality.

By the way, the CBO conducted a study similar to this and found that a lack of insurance increased mortality rates by only about 3%.  And that number was consistent across income scales.

Unfortunately, that study isn’t nearly fantastic enough for liberal tastes.