Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Universal Healthcare Will Save Lives, Delaying Its Arrival Is Murder

[h/t James Hughes] Not that we don't all know all of this already anyway, but in an article published in today's New York Times, Nicholas Bakalar reports on the findings of a recent study demonstrating (again) the striking impact of Medicare on the health of late middle-aged people, and especially its beneficial impact for uninsured people.
Uninsured people 55 and older, particularly those with diabetes and cardiovascular disease, significantly reduce their risk of declining health after they enroll in Medicare at 65…

Scores [indicators of health] for all elderly participants decreased over time, but for each year before 65 the scores of the insured declined more slowly than those of the uninsured. After 65, the uninsured began to catch up. By 70, the gap in scores was 50 percent of that expected if they had not gained Medicare coverage. Uninsured people with heart disease and diabetes radically cut their expected rate of decline, to a point where they were almost as healthy at 72 as they were at 65.

Dr. J. Michael McWilliams, the lead author of the paper discussed in the article, summarized its implications, saying: "Our findings provide some of the strongest evidence yet that expanding health coverage to the uninsured improves their health… [especially for older people suffering from] conditions like hypertension, diabetes and heart disease, for which there are effective therapies."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Murder is always illegal, so it is not murder. Delaying the arrival of universal health care would kill a lot of people, though, so it is still very bad (delaying universal healthcare is very bad).