“Mr. Milloy believes the study will give Mr. Obama more specific numbers to use in order to ramp up public support for his plan.”
“They are trying to create these factoids that they can beat opponents over the head with,” Mr. Milloy said. “They interviewed 9,000 people between 1988 and 1994 and asked, ‘Do you have health insurance?’ and if you die at some point in the future, they assume your death was caused by the fact you didn’t have insurance during that time you were interviewed.”
“That kind of stuff is classic junk science,” Mr. Milloy added.
John C. Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, agreed that the study was flawed. “The subjects were interviewed only once and the study tries to link their insurance status at that time to mortality a decade later. Yet over the period, the authors have no idea whether subjects were insured or uninsured, what kind of medical care they received, or even cause of death,” he said in a statement.
NPCA noted that a “more careful study” completed by the Congressional Budget Office found that low-income people without insurance had a 3 percent higher chance of death, but found no difference among higher income earners.
