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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 8/2/12

Are Republican Governors Ready to Kill Tens of Thousands to Placate the Tea Party?

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Rob Kall
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  Kill is a strong word. It's my word, not the word of a source or researcher. But it's the word that came to mind when I read reports of a Harvard study, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study reported that there was a greater than six percent decline in death rate in states that expanded Medicaid.

 

Now, the study didn't say kill. It looked at mortality rates. I interviewed one of the authors of the study, Dr. Benjamin Sommers.   Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Economics at Harvard School of Public Health, a health policy researcher and a primary care physician. 

 

In our recorded interview, broadcast, August 1, on my Bottom Up Radio Show, on WNJC 1360 AM, Dr. Sommers described the study,

"...we were looking at Medicaid and we were looking at states that chose to expand Medicaid eligibility to low income adults in the early part of the 2000 decade and traditionally Medicaid only covers people in certain groups of eligibility-- disabled adults, low income children, parents and pregnant women. But these states took the step of voluntarily expanding to adults who did not have any children at home and don't have disability. These groups are sometimes called "childless adults," and among these low income "childless adults," most states in the U.S. just don't have any coverage available to them. But these states: Arizona, New York and Maine, took the step in 2001, 2002 to expand coverage to them.

 

And this is a real important experiment for us to look at because this is pretty similar to what the "Affordable Care Act" will do in 2014; expanding Medicaid to all adults up to 138% of the federal poverty level. And basically what we did then, in a study, is we looked at those three states and we compared to them to four neighboring states that didn't expand their Medicaid programs and we looked at the impact on several different outcomes.

 

First, we just looked at insurance coverage, then we looked at access to care, health and finally, most importantly, we looked at life expectancy or survival. And what we found was that in the states that expanded their Medicaid program compared to those that didn't, mortality--the death rate among adults 19-64 actually went down by about 6% per year over that period. And this translates into nearly 2800 deaths prevented per year in these states that expanded Medicaid."

 

This was pretty much a summary of what the New England Journal of Medicine study reported here: Mortality and Access to Care among Adults after State Medicaid Expansions

 

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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness (more...)
 

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