http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jul/30/bill-pascrell/pascrell-says-22000-americans-die-yearly-because-t/"As many as 22,000 Americans die each year because they don’t have health insurance."
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Bill Pascrell on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 in a speech on the House floor
Pascrell says up to 22,000 Americans die yearly because they don’t have health insurance
True
The debate over reforming the U.S. health care system has inspired a torrent of often conflicting statistics. We will look at three assertions made by Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey. In this item, we will test his assertion that “as many as 22,000 Americans die each year because they don’t have health insurance.”
On July 28, 2009, Pascrell took to the House floor to counter assertions by Republicans and others that a Democratic bill under consideration in the chamber would lead to the rationing of health care. Pascrell’s larger point was that rationing already exists today, just a different type – thanks to the financial barriers to coverage faced by millions of Americans.
Specifically, Pascrell said: “Forty-five percent of Americans went without needed care because of costs in this country in 2007. That’s rationing. Fifty-three percent of Americans cut back on their health care in the last year because of costs. That’s rationing. … As many as 22,000 Americans die each year because they don’t have health insurance. My brothers and sisters, that’s rationing.”
We are not going to weigh in on the question of whether it’s fair to equate Pascrell’s examples of “rationing” with what the bill’s critics charge the bill would do if enacted. Rather, we wanted to gauge whether Pascrell’s numbers were sound. So we looked at these three claims individually.
The number in this claim comes from “Uninsured and Dying Because of It: Updating the Institute of Medicine Analysis on the Impact of Uninsurance on Mortality,” a paper published in January 2008 by the Urban Institute, a think tank. Stan Dorn, a senior research associate, wrote the paper to bring up to date a 2002 study by the federally chartered Institute of Medicine that estimated that 18,000 Americans died in 2000 because they were uninsured.
Dorn replicated the methodology of the Institute of Medicine, which developed long-term studies that measured the links between insurance status and death rates. The intitute’s researchers then used annual statistics on insurance rates and deaths to determine an estimate of extra deaths attributable to the lack of insurance. Dorn used newer data to redo the calculations and concluded that 22,000 people died due to lack of insurance in 2006. We tried to contact Dorn to see if the numbers could be brought even further up to date, but we were unable to reach him.
In his paper, Dorn acknowledges important caveats. He writes that his numbers are estimates that should not be viewed “as precise ‘body counts.’ The true number of deaths resulting from uninsurance may be somewhat higher or lower than the estimates in this paper,” adding that that number “is surely significant.”
To his credit, Pascrell appears to understand these uncertainties, saying “as many as 22,000” in his speech, rather than settling on a specific number. And he’s also more up-to-date than his colleague, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who cited the older, 18,000 figure on the July 28, 2009, edition of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show
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One day you may know and love one of these 22,000 people.
(If you don't already).
XOXO
Me
PLEASE ALSO SEE: my blog entry here:
http://flintville.multiply.com/journal/item/840Entitled Simply: "Health Care (No Fear, Only FACTS)"
