Re: John R. Lott, Jr. - As Obama Pushes National Health Care, Most Americans Already Happy With Coverage


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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/24/obama-pushes-national-health-
care-americans-happy-coverage/

CoveragAs Obama Pushes National Health Care, Most Americans Already
Happy With Coverage
As the Obama administration pushes for a national health care plan,
studies show that most Americans are overwhelmingly happy with their own
health care -- including most of the 46 million Americans without insurance.
By John R. Lott, Jr.
FOXNews.com

Wednesday, June 24, 2009


As the Obama administration pushes for a national health care plan,
studies show that most Americans are overwhelmingly happy with their own
health care -- but they are dissatisfied with the country's overall
system, because most Americans who have insurance believe that those who
don't have it are not receiving care.

Those same studies, however, show that a surprisingly large 70 percent
of the estimated 46 million Americans who don't have insurance say they
do, in fact, receive health care, and that a vast majority of them are
satisfied with it.

A survey conducted jointly by the Kaiser Family Foundation, ABC News and
USA Today, released in October 2006, found that 89 percent of Americans
were satisfied with their own personal medical care, but only 44 percent
were satisfied with the overall quality of the American medical system.
The survey is the only recent poll for which data is publicly available
that allows for a comparison of the satisfaction of insured and
uninsured Americans. (The data from a just-completed New York Times/CBS
poll won't be publicly available for several months; the results that
have been reported so far don't make the comparisons discussed in this
article.)

Those with recent serious health problems, possibly the people with the
best knowledge of how health care is working, were generally the most
satisfied. Ninety-three percent of insured Americans who had recently
suffered a serious illness were satisfied with their health care. So
were 95 percent of those who suffered from chronic illness.

President Obama, in his press conference on Tuesday, seemed to
understand that degree of satisfaction. While promising to help people
who are "out of luck" on insurance, he said: "If you like your plan and
you like your doctor, you won't have to do a thing. You keep your plan;
you keep your doctor. If your employer's providing you good health
insurance, terrific. We're not going to mess with it."

But while insured Americans say overwhelmingly that they are satisfied,
more than half of them -- 52 percent -- believe that becoming uninsured
poses a "critical problem," 36 percent view the threat as "serious but
not critical," and another 7 percent see it as a "problem, but not
serious." Only 4 percent view it as "not much of a problem."

Uninsured Americans, not surprisingly, are not as satisfied as people
who have insurance. Nonetheless, 70 percent of the uninsured who
indicated their level of satisfaction said they were either "satisfied"
or "very satisfied" with their health care, and only 17.5 percent said
they were "very dissatisfied."

Analysts say legislators should pay close attention before enacting a
national health care plan.

"If the insured come to believe that the uninsured are not that
dissatisfied with their health care, it is extremely important. It could
throw a real wild card into the whole health care debate," Jack Calfee,
a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told FOXNews.com.

"It is a common finding in public opinion research," Henry Aaron, a
senior fellow for economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told
FOXNews.com. "People are satisfied in the small, but dissatisfied in the
large. People are satisfied with their child's teachers or school, but
dissatisfied with schools generally.... They are satisfied with their
doctor or their last visit to the hospital, but they are dissatisfied
with what they perceive is happening with medical care as a whole. This
finding is just one additional example."

The Kaiser/ABC News/USA Today survey found that about 13.4 percent of
Americans were uninsured (a number slightly smaller than the 15.5
percent estimate used in policy debates from a Department of Labor
survey). In crunching the numbers, since 13.4 percent multiplied by the
17.5 percent of the uninsured said that they were "very dissatisfied,"
it follows that out of all Americans, only 2.3 percent are both
uninsured and "very dissatisfied" with the care they receive. The number
rises to 3.9 percent when you include all the uninsured who are
dissatisfied in any way with their health care.

To put those numbers differently, 5 million uninsured Americans are very
dissatisfied with their health care. Including those dissatisfied in any
way raises that to 8.4 million.

The survey of patient satisfaction also asked about the aspects of
health care that dissatisfy Americans. The uninsured were most
dissatisfied with their "ability to get the latest, most sophisticated
medical treatments" (35 percent were "very dissatisfied"), followed by
their ability to get non-emergency medical treatments without having to
wait" (32 percent), and their "ability to see top-quality medical
specialists, if you ever need one" (31 percent). At the other end, only
10 percent of the uninsured felt "very dissatisfied" with "the quality
of their communication" with their doctor.

A majority of the uninsured are not desperately poor; about 60 percent
of them have personal incomes over $50,000 per year and pay out of their
own pockets when necessary, rather than paying for insurance. Others
manage to obtain care at highly discounted rates as charity cases.

But there are two other reasons why most uninsured are satisfied: About
14 million of the "uninsured" qualify for Medicaid, and pre-existing
conditions do not exclude people from joining the government program. As
a result, many who are eligible for Medicaid wait until they need care
to register, so they are effectively insured at all times even when they
are not formally enrolled in the program.

In addition, once those who are already effectively covered by Medicaid
are excluded, nearly 70 percent of the remaining uninsured are without
insurance for less than four months. The large majority may be uninsured
for such short periods of time that being uninsured is never relevant
for their ability to get health care.

Under Obama's proposal, the government will provide insurance and
determine the compensation doctors receive for different services, but
doctors' offices and hospitals will still technically be privately run.
Many Republicans claim that the subsidies and other advantages provided
to government insurance would drive private insurance companies out of
business. If so, Obama's proposal would be identical to Canada's health
insurance program, so it is useful to compare Americans' satisfaction to
Canadians'.

A May 2008 survey by Harris/Decima TeleVox asked Canadians the same
questions that appeared in the Kaiser/ABC News/USA Today survey two
years earlier. In most comparisons, Canadians were more satisfied than
uninsured Americans, but just barely, and they were nowhere as satisfied
as insured Americans. Canadians are most similar to insured Americans in
terms of their happiness with their ability "to get non-emergency care
without having to wait." While 77 percent of insured Americans and 41
percent of uninsured Americans were satisfied with timely non-emergency
care, the figure for all Canadians was 60 percent.

Among the biggest differences between percentage of Canadians and
insured Americans who were satisfied were the "ability to see
top-quality medical specialists, if you ever need one" (26 percentage
points difference) and the "ability to get emergency care" (24
percentage points difference).

Another comparison between the U.S. and Canada can be made in terms of
how egalitarian the two systems are. That is, is there much difference
in levels of happiness between people based on race, education, income,
marital status, age, political views, or income? For both Americans and
Canadians, higher incomes don't buy higher levels of satisfaction with
their health care. In the U.S., there is no difference in happiness by
race; blacks are just as satisfied as whites or Asians or Hispanics.
Canadians do experience greater differences in happiness across
provinces than Americans face across states.

There are certainly some cases in the U.S. where uninsured individuals
end up spending much of their life-savings on health care. But only a
very small minority of Americans are not covered by insurance and are
simultaneously "very dissatisfied" or "dissatisfied" with the health
care that they receive.

Sources:

-Uninsured Americans vs. Insured Canadians: Who is More Satisfied with
Their Health Care? Oct. 15, 2008
-ABC News/USA TODAY/Kaiser Family Foundation health care poll Apr. 27, 2009
-President Obama press briefing June 23, 2009
-Household Income Rises, Poverty Rate Declines, Number of Uninsured Up
Aug. 28, 2007
-Health-Reform Traps: Universal What? June 22, 2009
-Harris/Decima TeleVox poll on Canadian health care May 14, 2008

Obviously these people are unaware that they are NOT happy with their
coverage. It would appear that everything - every issue facing Obama's
presidency, and every want and need of the American public - hinges on
'solving' the health care problem. Obama can hardly orate a whole paragraph
without mentioning that health care is an urgent problem that must be solved
by tomorrow at the latest?

And yet, no one seems to ask him why it's so urgent.

Oh, people ask but the questions are side tracked, "don't worry, trust us."
Jamming bills through congress has been the tactic since the Clinton administration.
Remember all the kiddy porn bills congress just "had" to pass, bills that took
away adult first amendment rights so the government could "protect chuldren."?
And then there was the Patriot Act, legislation that was loaded with Justice Dept,
FBI, CIA, NSA wish list items that virtually took away constitutional protections
to "capture terrorists" but which are being used against ordinary American citizens.
Today congress is voting on the Waxman Markey bill, an onerous piece of
legislation that if passed will double our energy costs in the name of fighting
"global warming". This bill won't stop or even alter global warming but is just
a hidden tax to provide more spending money for congress. The bill is thousands
of pages long and one congressman told Glenn Beck at Fox news that he "wished
he had the time to read it before voting." Yet this bill will double our heating, electric,
gasoline bills by puting a huge tax on energy producers which will be passed on to
their customers, you and me.
This country is in deeeeep ***!


--
Some people are more interested in
creating heat than shedding light.

.

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