HPHWD

Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll, who offer wonderfully helpful health policy analysis on their blog The Incidental Economist, wish that we could just debate the issues, without getting into the people presenting positions. I appreciate their preferences. But it can’t be done.

This helps to explain why 12 percent of all Americans believe that the ACA already has been scrubbed. Every time a commentator mentions “health care reform” and “repeal” in the same sentence, the words will sink into that morass of half-truths and fictions that we call “the conventional wisdom.

Via HuffPost/Pollster, Democratic pollster Mark Mellman offers his overview of where public opinion currently stands on the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Mellman cites figures of roughly 30% (Fox News poll) and 33% (CBS/New York Times poll) of Americans favoring full repeal of the ACA. These percentages, though far from a majority, are higher than the 25% of U.S. voters who favored repealing “all of it” in the 2012 exit polls.

So, where does this leave us with regard to the Oregon Health Study? I have no idea, actually. I am no expert on the bowels of Medicaid, and as I live and work in an extremely underserved region with devastating health inequities, far be it from me to claim that access to Medicaid in insignificant. In fact, as I argue at length, we need to be very careful in the implications we draw from the above evidence. First, it does not imply the moral insignificance of expanding access to health care services. No matter how we structure society, people will fall sick, and I have no hesitation in saying that we ought to care for them. But we should not confuse this ethical proposition with an empirical counterfactual, viz., that in a world in which we did expand such access we would see significant improvements in overall population health. Second, beware the false choice fallacy. There is no contradiction between collective action on the SDOH and expanding access to basic health care services.

Launch of the ACA’s controversial Independent Advisory Board– a panel charged with recommending ways to curb Medicare inflation — has been delayed until 2016. Does this means that the IPAB’s critics have won?