Hits & Misses – 2008/12/01
Race Matters. Not surprising. But this is the first study [gated, but with abstract] I have seen that treats Medicaid enrollment as equivalent to being uninsured.
Geography Matters More. "While race matters….where you live can matter even more. Furthermore, there are some regions where African Americans receive equal or better care than whites." [link]
Insurance for Mainly Healthy People Is Cheap. According to an eHealth Insurance report, the average monthly premium was $130 per month for individual policies and $366 for families. Hat tip to Grace-Marie Turner.
Tobacco Deal, Ten Years On. Very funny video reenactment of how the deal was struck. [link]
So glad to see CEI’s reenactment of the tobacco deal. Most people don’t realize that this was a total money grab by the states — overwhelmingly paid for by people at the botton of the income ladder.
Bruce, you forgot to mention how truly hypocritical everyone (everyone that’s getting the money, that is) has been. The standard line is that this money is encouraging people not to smoke and that the funds are paying the medical bills of smokers who get sick.
None of it is true!
One problem wih the Archives of Surgery study: They did not do a formal test to verify that there was no difference between being uninsured and being on Medicaid. They just assumed there was no difference.
Or,and this may be more likely, if they did do a formal test, they did not report it.