Health Insurance Info for Colorado

news & commentary on health insurance and benefits

Misleading the Supreme Court on Obamacare

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As I’ve written before, one of  the central defenses for the Affordable Care Act, as put forth by the Administration and echoed by all of it’s supporters, is the case for uncompensated care. Briefly stated, the Administration argued that uninsured patients drive up the costs of the delivery of health care sharply, and that cost is borne by all who are insured – hence, the primary reason for Obamacare.

I’ve also stated that this is, in fact, a canard – the total cost of uncompensated care is a scant fraction of the cost of Obamacare, now estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at somewhere around $1.76T for the first ten years (and this figure will rise, probably rise to more than $2T within the next year or so, unless the entire statute is declared unconstitutional or repealed). Spending the functional equivalent of $2T to fix a problem of less than $100B is not efficient – it’s one that only the federal government would develop, support, and champion.

The data that was used to make much of the argument around uncompensated care comes from a study done by FamiliesUSA, an ultra-left wing group that is on record as supporting a single-payor system. In that study, published in 2009, the cost of uncompensated care was estimated at $43 billion, the figure used by the Obamacare lawyers in it’s brief before the Supreme Court.

But as it turns out, there are major flaws in that study, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who follows how the left uses suspect statistics and shady reasoning to advance an agenda, the flaws inflate the costs to arrive at a foregone conclusion. David Hogberg, writing for Investors Business Daily Online, details the specifics here.

Researchers, led by Jack Hadley at the Urban Institute, examined uncompensated care and arrived at a different conclusion in the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured: that uncompensated care was “most likely about $8 billion. Given that total private health insurance expenditures in 2008 are estimated to be $829.9 billion (from NHEA projections), the amount potentially associated with cost-shifting represents less than one percent of private health insurance costs.” Documented here.

If the feds were really serious about “uncompensated care”, they’d look no further than their own under-compensated reimbursement scheme for Medicare, which dictates what Washington pays for its care under Medicare and other social welfare medical programs – which is in fact a far greater cost-shift to the private market than the care that is delivered to the uninsured. The accounting gimmick used – price fixing by Medicare through the HHS – transfers billions in costs directly to every American with a health insurance policy, and dwarfs any amount spent for uncompensated care that the Administration is touting as its primary reason for Obamacare.

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