October 23, 2009
Malkin: Number of deaths from lack of insurance based on bad math.
Michelle Malkin exposes the truth behind the misleading number of deaths of the uninsured as reported by Alan “Die Quickly” Grayson:
At no time did the original researchers or the single-payer activists who piggy-backed off their data ever verify whether the supposed casualties of America’s callous health care system had insurance or not. In fact, here is what the report actually says:
“Our study has several limitations,” the authors concede. The survey data they used “assessed health insurance at a single point in time and did not validate self-reported insurance status. We were unable to measure the effect of gaining or losing coverage after the interview.” Himmelstein et al. simply assumed that point-in-time uninsurance translates into perpetual uninsurance – and that any health calamities that result can and must be blamed on being uninsured.
Another caveat you won’t see on Rep. Grayson’s memorial to the dubious dead: The single-payer advocate-authors also conceded in their study limitations section that “earlier population-based surveys that did validate insurance status found that between 7% and 11% of those initially recorded as being uninsured were misclassified. If present, such misclassification might dilute the true effect of uninsurance in our sample.”
To boil it all down in plain English: The single-payer scientists had no way of assessing whether the survey participants received insurance coverage between the time they answered the questionnaires and the time they died. They had no way of assessing whether the deaths could have been averted with health insurance coverage. A significant portion of those classified as “uninsured” may not have even been uninsured, based on past studies that actually did verify insurance status. But the Himmelstein team just took the rate of uninsurance from the original study (3.3 percent), applied it to census data, and voila: more than 44,000 Americans are dying from lack of insurance.
Next, the political doctors cooked up scary-specific death tolls for all 50 states (California – 5,302 Texas – 4,675!) Newspapers dutifully cited the fear-mongering factoids. The single-payer lobbying group co-founded by Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler took it from there. Last month, the group setup its own memorial on the National Mall for the phantom 44,000 casualties of uninsurance.
Dr. Himmelstein (who was also the driving force behind another flawed study tying medical debt to personal bankruptcies) eschewed scientific nuance and caveats to take to the airwaves and declare starkly that an American “dies every 12 minutes” because of lack of insurance. And now, Democrat Rep. Grayson has taken the monumentally dishonest concept online to solicit sob stories and put flesh on the weak bones of these dubious death numbers.
Where’s the White House health care “reality check” squad when you need it?
Nothing new or shocking, here. Democrats are always cooking the numbers to fit the needs of pushing their radical agenda on America. We can put this down with the misleading “47 million uninsured Americans,” the “one in four women who will be a victim to sexual assault,” and the “one in three women will have an abortion by the age of 45.” I thought the days of science taking a back seat to ideology were over?
I’m sorry, even if the number were accurate, am I supposed to be impressed with the “one American dies every 12 minutes due to lack of health insurance” statistic? Here’s a real number for you, at over one million abortions performed in America every year, there’s an Amecan being murdered, not dying, from abortion about every 30 seconds. Why don’t we talk about that? Then, we can talk about the sale of the aborted babies body parts. There are some numbers we can discuss.
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