Health Insurance Does Not Equal Longevity

"Speaking of studies, all of America has been participating in an experiment since 2010 to see if a federal effort to extend government-mandated insurance coverage to millions more people can improve our lives. Last year the Obama Administration bragged that 20 million adults had gained health insurance as a result of Mr. Obama’s so-called Affordable Care Act.

"Given the Sanders logic, one might have expected to see a corresponding improvement in public health. But so far evidence that ObamaCare made us healthier has proven elusive, to say the least."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-didnt-obamacare-make-us-healthier-1498508891

Why Obamacare Didn't Make Us Healthier

Part of why obamacare didn't make us healthier is that we are killing ourselves, and the health care system can't do much about that.

Speaking of studies, all of America has been participating in an experiment since 2010 to see if a federal effort to extend government-mandated insurance coverage to millions more people can improve our lives. Last year the Obama Administration bragged that 20 million adults had gained health insurance as a result of Mr. Obama’s so-called Affordable Care Act.

Given the Sanders logic, one might have expected to see a corresponding improvement in public health. But so far evidence that ObamaCare made us healthier has proven elusive, to say the least. In December the New York Times was among the many news outlets that had to share the embarrassing news:

American life expectancy is in decline for the first time since 1993, when H.I.V.-related deaths were at their peak. But this time, researchers can’t identify a single problem driving the drop, and are instead pointing to a number of factors, from heart disease to suicides, that have caused a greater number of deaths.

A study on mortality rates released on Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that Americans could expect to live for 78.8 years in 2015, a decrease of 0.1 from the year before. The overall death rate increased 1.2 percent — that’s about 86,212 more deaths than those recorded in 2014.
http://thegrayarea.org/?p=126743

Insurance doesn't create health, it doesn't prevent us from killing ourselves. 78% of mortality is tied to what we eat and how we live. It's gauche these days to blame anyone for anything bad that happens to them.  We are often to blame, nonetheless.

Insurance or care and what's the diff?

Under a long-standing convention unexamined in today’s debates, health insurance is one thing and health care is something else, the former’s principal purpose being to enable patients to afford the latter. Although consumers can choose among financing plans, the content (and thus the costliness) of the care they expect to receive is not negotiable. Instead, all insured patients are essentially entitled, by common law or otherwise, to both provider services meeting a poorly specified “standard of care” and plan payment for all care deemed “medically necessary.” These near-universal terms of entitlement amount to an industry-friendly system of command-and-control regulation because applying them requires reference to medical experts. The professional paradigm of medical care these experts bring with them essentially holds that patients should receive, at whatever cost, any service with some chance of yielding a medical benefit.
https://qz.com/1010259/the-100-billion-per-year-back-pain-industry-is-mostly-a-hoax/

McArdle on the Obamacare Misery

The insurers are predictably furious. And it’s hard to blame them. One thing I haven’t seen anyone point out is that if insurers do go along with this, we’re talking about a massive cash transfer from the insurers to the customers in those grandfathered plans. Some of the left-wing commentators I’ve seen seem to be under the impression that health insurers make fabulous profits, and canceling plans was a venal move to further line their overflowing pockets with your hard-earned dollars. In fact, health insurance profits are quite modest(though relatively steady). Their business and rates are very heavily regulated, and never more so than post-Obamacare, when insurers with excess profits in the individual market have to contribute half their overage to a reinsurance fund. Those people suggested that insurers would decline to renew the policies so that they could keep all that extra cash.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-14/obamacare-is-whatever-obama-says-it-is.html

This part makes me sick - you knew the insurance companies were going to crony right up to government to make sure that they can still get theirs, and the crony/govt fiasco's are the worst:  "It’s a pretty bold move for Obama to hang the insurers out to dry like this, considering that he reportedly needs their technical help to get the exchanges working and some cooperation to keep rates low prior to next year’s midterm elections."
Can they afford to take the risk of rebellion?