“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Benjamin Disraeli
The L.A. Times provides a nice set of cherry picked data to justify the Affordable Care Act. The author is also fond of the word fatuous to describe Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare, so I feel compelled to maintain usage of the word my thoughts on the matter.Ignoring the long descent that healthcare has been on for decades now, and then claiming that slowing the growth rate of healthcare spend, while it still moves above the general rate of inflation and much of the decrease in observed to expected growth is related to the recession, is analogous to giving a kid a blindfold and a bat and told to hit the piñata in the tree in your backyard, meantime you have tied the piñata to a forest in the park two miles away. When the kid swings and misses, you take the blindfold off and tell him to try again, and declare success when he at least swings level at the air. The point being, even if Obamacare impacted these selective statistics, it is still miles from being where it needs to be.
To wit, there is many citations of costs decreasing, but the author conveniently ignores that those costs are going back up and projected to once again hit their stride of 6% a year, double the rate of inflation, for the foreseeable future. The recession was a temporary halt in healthcare spend, so it is really convenient to leave that fact out. Consider that in 1946 the average inflation adjusted hospital stay was $30 per day whereas today it is an astounding $2,200, a 70-fold increase. Trumpeting a modest decrease in this awful record is quite a bit like missing the forest for the trees.
Plus, while there is a lot of current debate about the tactics of repeal and replace given the slim Senate majority and how to use arcane Senate rules on budget reconciliation, Paul Ryan and others have come up with plans on replacing Obamacare, all under the banner of the Better Way moniker, which I detail in further detail elsewhere. Apparently this journalist is too lazy to look that up. But yes, I do hope that Republicans don’t take the risk of getting repeal without replace and do both at once. I honestly am not holding my breath given Republican ineptitude in the past.
It’s nice that the uninsured rate is going down, but of course a federal mandate to buy health insurance upon pain of hefty tax penalties is going to increase insurance rates. Would you praise a parent who upon their child spilling a drink or dropping food forced them to do 40 push-ups before eating again and then declaring to Facebook, “my child can do 40 pushups!”? No, I think not. At any rate, the real question is whether this metric on its own is the most important one and decoupled from the irrefutable evidence that healthcare costs and insurance premiums continue to skyrocket at a double-digit pace. Plus, recent research from economist Mark Warshawsky indicates that skyrocketing health insurance premiums have held down take home wages, as health insurance coverage has gone up for the lower and middle classes as a percentage of their total compensation from 4% to 12% in just a couple of decades – meaning they are not getting raises in take home pay because it is getting swallowed up in health insurance. Since inequality is a focus these days, look at the failures in our government run healthcare system as a main culprit.
If we are concerned with people not seeing the doctor, providing a stipend for catastrophic insurance and flexible Health savings accounts would have done the same thing without the enormous bureaucratic bloat that has led to skyrocketing premiums. And uncompensated care is an important gap to close, but this is all a bunch of cost shifting. What used to be covered through disproportionate share payments at the county and state levels, where great board oversight could be applied with local knowledge, is now being soaked up by cross-subsidies through the federal tax code – out of sight, out of mind, no accountability, and requiring hospitals to create a new administrative burden to work through the ACA and all its complexity.
This also ignores the many blatant failures of Obamacare, which I helpfully capture here. https://wordpress.com/post/gymnasiumsite.wordpress.com/117
The Gymnasium 