Note To Harry Reid: Thanks To Obamacare, People Are Dying On Wait Lists For Care

By Christopher Jacobs

Friday, December 16, 2016

He’s at it again—Harry Reid, that is. Thursday morning, the outgoing Senate minority leader claimed that if “you get rid of Obamacare, people are going to die.”

Apparently Reid forgot to heed Hillary Clinton’s warning about fake news, because the idea that thousands of people die from lack of health insurance has been rebutted by, of all people, a member of the Obama administration.

Richard Kronick, President Obama’s former director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in 2009 published a paper that “found that uninsured participants had no different risk of dying than those [who] were covered by employer-sponsored group insurance.”

Harry Reid, Science Denier

As multiple articles by fact-checking organizations have explained, it’s very difficult to control for all the variables associated with health, mortality, and lack of insurance. It’s a tough question to analyze: Do the uninsured die because they lack health insurance, or do they die because they are more likely to be poor? As Kronick himself stated:

It seems likely that if we were able to control for additional factors, such as health-related behaviors (smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity, and risk-taking behaviors more generally), wealth, or value placed on health or health care, the estimated [mortality] effect of being uninsured would be reduced further. What is uncertain is whether the reduction would being the estimated hazard ratio all the way down to 1.0 or whether an independent effect of being uninsured would remain.

Even liberals like the Brookings Institution’s Henry Aaron have conceded that much of the evidence—including a study from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which showed that access to health insurance had no measurable effect on physical health outcomes for patients—shows an unclear effect between insurance and mortality: “I am a strong advocate of measures to achieve universal insurance coverage and would rather that Kronick’s study and the Oregon project provided evidence in support of my policy preference. But, as far as mortality is concerned, they just don’t.”

Apparently things like evidence in support of one’s policy preferences present a novel concept to the outgoing leader. So much for the liberal allegation that conservatives are science deniers.

Obamacare Made Vulnerable People Die on Wait Lists

That said, if Reid wants to have a debate about Obamacare and dying, perhaps he should examine the thousands of individuals with disabilities who have been dying because Obamacare encourages discrimination against the most vulnerable. Because states get a higher federal match for expanding Medicaid to able-bodied adults than covering home-care needs for individuals with disabilities, more than half a million disabled Americans wait—and wait, and wait some more—to get access to needed care.

Except for those who die before they can access care. Last month, reports from Illinois noted that no fewer than 752 individuals with disabilities have died—yes, died—while on waiting lists to receive Medicaid services since that state expanded coverage under Obamacare. Ironically enough, on the very same day that Illinois’ legislature expanded Medicaid to the able-bodied under Obamacare, it cut medication funding to special-needs children.

This is “compassion” in the Obama administration’s eyes: Expanding services to the able-bodied while cutting services for special-needs kids.

As I have previously noted, this dynamic hasn’t just happened in Illinois. It has occurred all over the country. In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchison pledged to cut waiting lists for individuals with disabilities in half. Instead, they have grown by 25 percent, even as the state expanded coverage to the able-bodied. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich cut Medicaid eligibility for individuals with disabilities by 34,000, even as he unilaterally expanded the program to other Ohioans.

Making irresponsible claims about the effect of repealing Obamacare is bad enough. Making those claims in a vain attempt to justify a law that encourages discrimination against the most vulnerable really takes the cake. The American people deserve better than Reid’s false comments—and they deserve better than Obamacare.