Martin DyckmanThere has been some good news and bad news on the health-care front. The funny thing is, it’s the same news.
A study reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that the death rate in Massachusetts among people 20 to 64 dropped dramatically after it adopted the nation’s first universal health care law in 2006.
The rate fell by about three percent overall and “was steepest in counties with the highest proportions of poor and previously uninsured people,” according to a description in The New York Times this week.
That would mean several hundred lives saved every year by what ought to be called — to give credit where it’s due — Romneycare.
Notably, the study compared mortality rates in Massachusetts to those in 513 counties, in 46 other states, that were similar in almost every respect except universal health care. In those other places, the death rate was unchanged.
Whether this is good news or bad depends on one’s prejudices and politics.
The Massachusetts success is good news, of course, to everyone who assumed (a) that broader health care would save lives and (b) that it’s something a decent government really needs to do.
It’s bad news, though, to that significant minority of downright nasty people who would rather see others die than have the government do something to save them.
The evidence that Romneycare is working demolishes their purportedly “practical” arguments against the national program they derisively named Obamacare.
That soulless minority, unfortunately, includes the entire Republican membership of Congress, the entire Tea Party, the billionaire Koch brothers, and the controlling factions in legislatures such as those of Florida and North Carolina, which rejected the Medicaid expansion component of Obamacare.
Applied nationwide, a 3 percent decline in mortality would save some 17,000 lives every year, The Times said.
That stands to reason.
To quote the Times:
“In the waiting rooms of the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, bustling with a working-class clientele, doctors said much has changed since the state insurance law passed in 2006. People are less likely to put off care out of fear of unaffordable bills, and patients with diabetes can get medication regularly.”
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
Applied to health care, the salient facts of the moment are that, despite the computer catastrophe, more people signed up for Obamacare than expected, those who have it seem quite happy, the Massachusetts study suggests that thousands of lives will be saved, and even the insurance industry is refraining from joining the Republican chorus to repeal it.
But the chorus persists.
It’s playing to a certain audience that I have to confess confounds me.
At one notorious Tea Party rally, some people actually cheered the prospect of people dying because they hadn’t insured themselves.
It’s this fundamental meanness — rooted in racism and a visceral hatred for everyone “not like us” — that frustrates any reasonable reform of the immigration situation.
One probably could find a cruel streak permeating the politics of almost any country. It seems more jarring, though, when it’s your own country, especially considering that every other advanced nation has gotten beyond it where the health of its people is concerned.
It’s hard to understand how people with Medicare cards in their pockets can clamor to “get the government out of health care.”
If they really mean that, they should burn those Medicare cards.
According to a study reported by Kaiser Health News, a typical Medicare beneficiary’s health care will cost the government more than twice what he or she paid in Medicare taxes while still working.
That’s a subsidy. A huge one.
So if it’s right for people my age to get that subsidy, why is it wrong for our children and grandchildren?
Another bit of good news is that there are still plenty of older people who don’t think it is wrong. A bunch of them at a senior center in Boca Raton made that plain to Gov. Rick Scott last month when he went there expecting to use them as an anti-Obamacare dog and pony show.
Scott saw nothing wrong with government-funded health care when it was making him a millionaire many times over.
For him and for other politicians who ought to know better to be playing to the ugly side of America on this issue is the greatest hypocrisy of all. Politics does not excuse it.
It is more than hypocritical. It is evil.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
