Healthcare: Fun with numbers

The healthcare debate is still going strong. Obama has been called a liar, Grayson says the GOP wants people to die quickly, Reid wants to slip it through attached to another bill that already passed, and not even Dems can agree on a public option. The one thing almost everyone can agree on is that we do need some kind of reform. And from my perspective it really seems like our representative democracy has forgotten an important part of the whole deal, representing.

I find it interesting that our government has come down so hard on private companies being run poorly and even criminalizing it, yet look at how the country is being run. Obama is spending record amounts that we do not have, and Congress is helping him do it. Might as well throw Bush in there too, he did plenty of damage as well. Enron execs are in courtrooms while these idiots are getting away with much worse! But I digress.

Several stories that Grayson, other Dems, and the State Media have talked about in their attacks on the GOP and push for public healthcare have talked about specific people in the 45K. Several of the stories are about people that got something easily treatable and chose not to go to the doctor because they did not have insurance. This, they say, is how someone dies of not having insurance. I would submit to you, however, that these people died not because they did not have insurance, but because they were too dumb to actually drag themselves to the doctor or hospital. I am sorry they are dead, and I grieve for their families, but this is not an argument for free healthcare for all! (like it will be free really)

I want to dig into some numbers being thrown around. President Obama, right before saying that illegals would not be covered by public insurance and being called out of it by my hero Joe Wilson, stated that 47 million do not have healthcare in the United States. He has since dropped that number to 30 million tacitly acknowledging the truth in Wilson’s allegation by excluding the 17 million illegal aliens in the country. Apparently Grayson did not get that memo as he has been using the 47 million numbers.

Grayson also likes the 45K number that a Harvard study says die a year from not having insurance. I won’t get into how the study was flawed, and even acknowledged as flawed by the group doing it, but I will say that I have looked through the CDC numbers and have yet to come across a cause of death of “not insured.” Instead we get these, actual, causes of death.

Number of deaths for leading causes of death:

• Heart disease: 631,636
• Cancer: 559,888
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
• Diabetes: 72,449
• Alzheimer's disease: 72,432
• Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
• Septicemia: 34,234

More people died of the flu than of not being insured.

While we are at it, according to the CDC about 2.4 million die each year in the US. Well if 45K of them died because they were uninsured then 2,355,000 died FROM having insurance. Lets dig deeper into this.

If we go by the 47 Million numbers, and 45K died, then 1 in 666 died from not having insurance.

If we go by the 30 Million numbers, and 45K died, the 1 in 1044 died from not having insurance.

307 Million people live in the US, subtracting the 47 million is 260 Million. 2,355,000 died so 1 in 110 died FROM having insurance.

Conclusion: It is better to NOT have insurance.

But this is fun so let’s dig deeper.

47 Million have no insurance. But we take out the 17 million illegal aliens leaving 30 million. Of those there is 25%, or 7.5 Million, that are eligible for Medicaid or S-Chip. 20%, or 6 Million, have an income of over 58K per year and could conceivably afford insurance. And 20%, or 6 Million, have turned down their employer option for whatever reason. The last two numbers it is of course possible to have some overlap so for my purposes I am going to assume an overlap of 50% which gives us 9 Million that either turned down their employer option or make enough already to get their own insurance.

30,000,000 - 7,500,000 - 9,000,000 = 13.5 Million (or 4% of the population) that are slipping through the cracks. That is the number that we need to be targeting in the healthcare debate. We need reform that will help them! Leave the rest of us out of it!

On top of all this we just recently learned that some 63 million dollars in fraud was identified in the Medicaid system in just 5 states! If we just pass that down and multiply it by 10 to get to 50 states that is 630 million dollars! Fix that and pay for the 13.5 million needing help!

Before I conclude I also want to touch on something that people that support public healthcare like to point to. They constantly bring up stories about people being denied coverage on procedures and how it impacted their lives. I understand where they are coming from; I really do, as we ran through a lot of this with my wife and our insurance company recently. But do these people really think that the government run healthcare will never deny a claim? Maybe you need to look at the following chart.



You guessed it, Medicare denies more claims than anyone else!

I am not saying that we do not need healthcare reform. We do. But it is certainly not something to rush into. Take some time to do it right, and listen to your constituents. Or find another job.