The Bankruptcy Issue — Again
It’s now been four years since Massachusetts passed its health care reform, which seems long enough for reform to have produced a decline in all the medical bankruptcies we are told result from the lack of universal health care in the United States.
Of course, this is somewhat complicated by the intervening financial crisis. But I figured that graphing bankruptcies in the state of Massachusetts against bankruptcies in the United States as a whole, would give us some indication as to whether Massachusetts is bucking the trend. Here’s what the data look like (quarterly total filings per state*):
There’s some random variance, of course, but nothing that suggests that bankruptcies in Massachusetts have fallen significantly as a result of its new health care program–this even though the percentage of uninsured in the state is now somewhere between 2-5%, depending on which data source you use.
This is from Megan McArdle. She also has other charts and more good discussion of the issue (or non-issue) at her site.
I’m not surprised. You guys exploded that myth some time back.
Good article by Megan.
Odd, you did not show the per capita graph. Not especially meaningful w/o both starting at zero.
Steve
Two different scales achieve essentially the same result as per capita numbers.
This was always a phony issue.
Massachusetts “dramatic reduction” in the number of uninsured has always been a phony issue (making all the rest of the promised/expected benefits of Romneycare equally phony). Healthcare insurance was invented in Massachusetts over 150 years ago. A high percentage of people in Massachusetts have always had insurance to cover health care needs.
To further increase the phoniness, the Census Bureau numbers and surveys done by the state were not showing the 98% coverage promised. (Actually the proponents originally promised near 100% coverage but within a few months of the 2006 roll-out had realized that was impossible.) When even 98% didn’t work out according to the last survey conducted by the state itself in 2007, the Patrick administration cooked the books by changing the methodology by which it counted the insured/uninsured and using the far-left-wing Urban Institute to manipulate the data. Voila, now we have 98% coverage/2% uninsured.
I am not arguing that the number of insured did not go up. How could it not have? The state gives the insurance away for free. (But — as explained on my web site — the number of people actually buying insurance has dropped according since Romneycare’s mandate kicked in.) The only issue is whether it went up from 90% to 95% as per the Census Bureau or from 94% to 96% as per the original state Department of Healthcare and Finance Policy (DHCFP) statistics or from 96% to 98% as per the Urban Institute. Whatever the numbers, it wouldn’t have been enough of a change statistically to affect bankruptcies.
— Dennis Byron