This PPACA thing could be worse than we thought.
A study just out in the latest page-turning issue of Annals of Internal Medicine reveals that health care reform could actually improve our national mortality rate. The study, "Changes in Mortality After Massachusetts Health Care Reform," looked at mortality rates in various Massachusetts counties before and after they passed their own health reform back in 2006. And the data suggests the mortality rate fell nearly 3 percent in just four years.
According to a report in the New York Times, if you extrapolated that nationally, there'd be 17,000 fewer deaths every year.
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"We hypothesized that the reform reduced mortality, particularly from causes potentially treatable with timely care (such as cardiovascular disease, infections, and cancer), and that larger changes among groups were likely to benefit from the law – previously uninsured adults and those with higher pre-reform mortality rates," the researchers explained in their analysis.
This is clearly a problem. We simply don't have the infrastructure to handle that many more people.
I mean technology's helping us live longer already. And it's costing us a fortune. We can't afford even more doddering old people wandering around. (You think we have a retirement crisis now?)
Maybe it's time we did start talking about the death panels again to weed some of these would-be Methusalahs out of the system.
Speaking of which, can someone please explain to me why that botched Arkansas execution has everyone up in arms? (And while you're at it, why are we all saying it was botched. The dude still died, didn't he?) Does it really matter he wasn't unconscious? Hell, who would argue that the writhing criminal dying slowly like some kind of Game of Thrones character isn't the best deterrent ever? Isn't that why executions used to be public? I mean, c'mon, who are we sanitizing these state-sanctioned murders for anyway, these dregs of society or just to help us sleep at night? Either way, we don't do them (or us) any favors. If we're gonna kill people for, you know, killing people, let's put that stuff on TV.
Word is, by the way, we're running low on the drugs some states use to off these killers. Let's just go back to firing squads. I'm pretty sure we aren't running low on bullets anytime soon in this country.
A final note: in my last, less tongue-in-cheek blog, I estimated (guessed?) the feds had spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million on the exchanges during the first enrollment period. I was embarrassingly conservative. The fix for HealthCare.gov alone cost much more than that. … I'm clearly in the wrong business …
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