Repealing Obamacare won’t kill anyone. And why is that?
Because it hasn’t saved anyone.
Despite threats from people like the Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who argues that “36,000 people will die yearly” if Obamacare is repealed, he has little evidence to support his claim.
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Now, of course, a few individuals have benefited from the Affordable Care Act “but attempts to claim broader effects on public health or thousands of lives saved rely upon extrapolation from past studies that focus on the value of private health insurance.”
According to Foundation for Economic Education:
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The ACA, however, has expanded coverage through Medicaid, a public program that, according to several studies, has failed to improve health outcomes for recipients. In fact, public health trends since the implementation of the ACA have worsened, with 80,000 more deaths in 2015 than had mortality continued declining during 2014–15 at the rate achieved during 2000–2013.
In other words, the ACA created greater bureaucracy, red tape, and federal intervention, but no real results.
The Manhattan Institute refutes Senator Chuck Schumer’s claim that cutting ACA will “make America sick again”. Instead, their key findings suggest otherwise:
The Affordable Care Act has led to substantial increases in Medicaid enrollment but shows no effect in the aggregate on private insurance coverage; a lower share of non-elderly Americans had private insurance in 2015 than at the start of the recession in 2007–08.
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Studies showing positive effects from health-insurance coverage focus on private insurance, not Medicaid.
A statistical claim that the ACA saves large numbers of lives should be supported by evidence that it has reduced mortality rates; yet the opposite occurred.
Indeed, Senior Fellow Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute reported, “The practical effect of the Affordable Care Act has been to expand the non-elderly adult population covered by Medicaid. Unfortunately, we know from numerous studies that such Medicaid expansions do not improve public health. Mortality data from the last several years indicate that the ACA has done no better. The statistical estimate for the net number of lives saved by Obamacare is zero.”
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And, if Obamacare hasn’t saved lives… then, what exactly will the Sanders and Schumers of the world say now?
They’ve lost their legs to stand on.
