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posted by LaminatorX on Friday October 31 2014, @07:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the take-your-medicine dept.

We know that about 10 million more people have insurance coverage this year as a result of the Affordable Care Act but until now it has been difficult to say much about who was getting that Obamacare coverage — where they live, their age, their income and other such details. Now Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz report in the NYT that a new data set is providing a clearer picture of which people gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The data is the output of a statistical model based on a large survey of adults and shows that the law has done something rather unusual in the American economy this century: It has pushed back against inequality, essentially redistributing income — in the form of health insurance or insurance subsidies — to many of the groups that have fared poorly over the last few decades. The biggest winners from the law include people between the ages of 18 and 34; blacks; Hispanics; and people who live in rural areas. The areas with the largest increases in the health insurance rate, for example, include rural Arkansas and Nevada; southern Texas; large swaths of New Mexico, Kentucky and West Virginia; and much of inland California and Oregon.

Despite many Republican voters’ disdain for the Affordable Care Act, parts of the country that lean the most heavily Republican (according to 2012 presidential election results) showed significantly more insurance gains than places where voters lean strongly Democratic. That partly reflects underlying rates of insurance. In liberal places, like Massachusetts and Hawaii, previous state policies had made insurance coverage much more widespread, leaving less room for improvement. But the correlation also reflects trends in wealth and poverty. Many of the poorest and most rural states in the country tend to favor Republican politicians.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by boris on Friday October 31 2014, @01:03PM

    by boris (1706) on Friday October 31 2014, @01:03PM (#111874)

    Nothing is free, but in a single payer system you have a few less middle men to pay such as the insurance company. How can having more middle men be more inexpensive? Also, US healthcare is absurdly expensive compared to Europe. What fixes that? The Free Market?

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 31 2014, @01:12PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday October 31 2014, @01:12PM (#111877) Homepage Journal

    In a single payer system you also have no choice but to pay and no say in how much you pay. You allow the government, notorious for not being able to do anything with money but waste it, to administer a huge chunk of the economy. I'll still pass, thanks.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @01:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @01:55PM (#111900)

      In the current system, the cost of services is completely made up. The cost of an MRI doesn't depend upon how much it costs to run the machine, it is priced upon the highest value that an insurance company will pay for a scan. Tell me the labor cost of the tech and running the machine costs the $5k/person they charge, so if they run 20 people through the machine in a day, you gonna tell me it costs $100k/day to run the machine??? You'd be off by two orders of magnitude. Since they can't charge different rates to different people, the uninsured are on the hook for the full $5k.

      Other than cries of socialism from people who apparently don't know what the word means, I have a very hard time seeing why health service costs are not regulated like electricity rates, water, rates, etc. Many of the same arguments for classifying ISPs as common carriers applies to health care services, but you don't hear too many people around here call that socialism, largely because they feel that in their own pockets as opposed to caring about some ficticious "welfare queen".

    • (Score: 2) by dublet on Friday October 31 2014, @04:25PM

      by dublet (2994) on Friday October 31 2014, @04:25PM (#111941)

      Yet the evidence indicates that the UK government is doing a better job that the US private sector.

      http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/uks-healthcare-ranked-the-best-out-of-11-western-countries-with-us-coming-last-9542833.html [independent.co.uk]

      The UK NHS costs $3,405 per capita and the US system $8,508. For worse care. The relevant table: http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article9542817.ece/alternates/w1024/Davis_Mirror_2014_ES1_for_web.jpg [independent.co.uk]

      (Note that this was before the Affortable Care Act.)

      According to the study, the UK “outperforms all countries” in the management of chronic illness. “The widespread and effective use of health information technology (HIT) in the UK plays a large role in the country’s high score on the chronic care management indicators, as well as its performance on system aspects of preventive care delivery.”

      Britain also apparently leads the way in stellar levels of patient communication, alongside Germany. This relates to whether patients reported that they always or often got a clear, understandable and timely response from their doctor.

      Customer feedback was also something that the UK excelled in, with 84 per cent of physicians receiving patient satisfaction data, compared with 60 per cent in the US which ranked third in that category.

      [...]

      Contrary to popular opinion, the report claimed that it is a "common mistake" to associate universal health coverage with long waiting times for specialised care.

      “The UK has short waiting times for basic medical care and nonemergency access to services after hours,” it says.

      “The UK also has improved waiting times to see a specialist and now rates fourth on this dimension with the US ranking third.”

      Overall, it was said that the UK provides “universal coverage with low out-of-pocket costs while maintaining quick access to specialty services.”

      ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 31 2014, @08:29PM

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday October 31 2014, @08:29PM (#112050) Homepage Journal

        Good for them. It makes me happy they're doing well. They don't apparently have a government that trips over itself to see who can sell their vote the fastest when they're not horribly mismanaging the 2-3% they actually try to spend on what it should be spent on.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.