Never one to let anything speak for itself, the president made his case for the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday, the day its exchanges launched. To listen to his speech, the health-care law has fixed the U.S. economy, will save tens of thousands of lives, and has solved the U.S.’s long-term debt problem. Needless to say, none of these things are true.
He began with a sort of Clintonian random factoid he said he’d heard the other day: that people who get cancer and have health insurance are 70 percent more likely to be alive after five years than people who get cancer and don’t have health insurance. I have no idea if this is true or not, statistically, because I couldn’t find the study — but (1) there are plenty of lurking variables here (people who have health insurance are more likely to survive it because they’re probably wealthier, have healthier habits, etc., and it’s impossible to control completely for all of this), and (2) if you get cancer, you’re significantly more likely to live another five years if you live in the U.S. than you are in any other wealthy country (there are problems with citing five-year survival rate, but he said it).
Then the president made a rather more dramatic claim, dispensing with statistical nuance altogether: “This is life-or-death stuff. Tens of thousands of Americans die each year just because they don’t have health insurance.” This isn’t true in the way most people would understand it: Obviously, tens of thousands of Americans do not die in ditches or outside the doors of hospitals because they lack insurance that will save their lives. But the claim isn’t entirely without a statistical basis: A 2009 study by Harvard Medical School found what a number of other studies had argued over the years, that uninsured people, adjusted for a wide range of factors, have higher death rates than people with insurance (its result was much stronger than those of other studies, though). Taking its finding that mortality rates for the uninsured are 40 percent higher than the insured, the authors calculate that in 2005 there were “approximately 44,789 deaths among Americans . . . associated with lack of health insurance.” (Note: Extrapolating the HMS numbers to the CBO’s predicted rates of insurance coverage after Obamacare is fully implemented at the cost of $200 billion a year, tens of thousands of Americans will still be dying for lack of insurance coverage.)
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