Mark Hyman’s recent commentary on healthcare is especially grotesque in its use of invalid arguments, misleading phrasing, doctored evidence, and flat-out falsehoods.
The argument being made is essentially that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”) is, at best, unhelpful and, at worst, deadly.
Hyman begins by saying “we have the greatest healthcare in the world”-- an example of the “glittering generality” fallacy—using nice-sounding words that don’t mean anything specific.
The truth? The United States has the best healthcare in the world by exactly one metric: the cost we spend per person.
The World Health Organization, using a range of metrics measuring actual health outcomes for a nation’s citizens, ranks the U.S. 37th in the world.
Hyman then says, “To suggest people are turned away from life-saving treatment over their ability to pay is just not true.”
This is an attempt to phrase the problem in a narrow way that obscures the reality. Yes, if you collapse due to a heart attack, you will be admitted to the hospital regardless of your insurance. However, if you don’t have insurance (or have bad insurance), you will not be covered for checkups, medication, and other preventative care that would keep you from having the heart attack in the first place.
In fact, the claim that no one dies because of lack of access to healthcare was rated as a “Pants-on-Fire” lie by nonpartisan Politifact when it was recently made by a Republican politician at a town hall event.
They noted that a 2009 (i.e. pre-Affordable Care Act) study in the American Journal of Public Health concluded that a lack of health insurance "is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths in the United States, more than those caused by kidney disease.”
Politifact also pointed out that the provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance alone led to a decrease in mortality among preventable illnesses, according to a study in the journal Medical Care.
In short (and not surprisingly), having insurance saves lives. Losing it (such as would happen to millions of Americans under any of the various Republican plans that failed to pass Congress) causes deaths.
Moreover, you may face tens of thousands dollar of debt when you leave.
In fact, health-related debt has been the prime cause of personal bankruptcies. Yes, the hospital might not turn you away, but they’ll send you a bill that you (and your children) might be paying for years and years to come.
Insurance is not a panacea for health debt, but Consumer Reports notes that the passage of the ACA contributed to a dramatic reduction in personal bankruptcies. Indeed, there were only 50% the number of filings in 2016 as there were in 2010, and while other factors are likely involved in the drop, experts cited the ACA as a major factor.
So, Hyman claimed that the U.S. had the best health care system in the world, but offered no evidence to support this. And, in fact, the data shows that we lag far behind most other modern nations (and some not-so-modern nations).
He says no one is turned away from a hospital if they need treatment, but he ignores that health insurance prevents the need for emergency treatment and saves lives (and dollars). He also ignores that one health emergency in a family—even a fairly minor one—can financially devastate a family.
He then makes the claim that the ACA did not improve the health of Americans. His lone evidence for this is a fractional downtick in life expectancy from 2015 to 2016: 0.1 years, to be exact.
This statistic is interesting and worth exploring for a variety of reasons, but there is no logical reason to connect it with the ACA. This is a classic example of the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy.
Moreover, Hyman makes a tactical error in citing life expectancy as a definitive metric of healthcare policy, since this same metric directly contradicts his earlier claim that the U.S. has the “greatest health care in the world.”
In fact, according to the World Health Organization, based on data from 2000-2015 the U.S. ranks 30th in life expectancy. Every nation in Western and Northern Europe beats us, as do Japan, South Korea, and Canada. All of these nations have some version of a national healthcare system. The evidence Hyman uses actually undercuts his own argument.
Hyman concludes his argument by saying that “Government-directed healthcare can be deadly” citing as evidence the recent case of a terminally ill child in the U.K. The problem is, of course, that medical experts found that the experimental treatment had no chance of improving the life of the infant and would likely simply produce additional suffering, for a child who was already completely paralyzed, unable to breathe, severely brain damaged, deaf, and blind.
One can argue the moral merits of cases like this, but to cite it as evidence of “government-directed” healthcare being lethal is utterly dishonest (and that’s even putting aside that the ACA is not “government-directed healthcare”; it’s private healthcare purchased through markets overseen by the government).
Hyman also cites a debunked claim that President Obama told a woman during a discussion on healthcare that her elderly mother might be better off without medical treatment and simply take a pain pill instead. Again, Politifact checked this claim when a GOP congressman made it in 2009. They found rated it “False” and noted that Obama had specifically stated that bureaucrats shouldn’t make health decisions.
If you relied on the link Hyman provided to the comments, you might be excused for falling for his claim, given that the clip was creatively edited to make Obama seem to say something he wasn’t, but as is often the case, Hyman counts on his audience not knowing or caring what the facts actually are.
But (and here’s the real issue), we make a mistake to assume that the debate is over how to best provide healthcare to Americans. It’s not. As is obvious from the evidence above, the U.S. market-driven healthcare system does not lead to good results, particularly when compared with the money spent. That is obvious with anyone with eyes to see. A free-market approach to healthcare simply doesn’t work for all kinds of reasons.
But it has become clear that a certain stripe of ideological conservative does not care about this. It’s not about outcomes. It’s about keeping the “precious bodily fluids” of free-market capitalism pure. Arguments like Hyman’s are meant to scare those who might not share his ideological puritanism into thinking that even modest measures like the ACA are unhelpful and even damaging.
However, I suspect Hyman himself, were he forced to grant the validity of the objective evidence against his claims, would become a convert to the cause of universal coverage. Such free-market purists see the market as not simply a financial system but as a moral barometer. If you cannot find a way to pay for your child’s leukemia treatment, that is evidence of your own unfitness. A truly productive, successful member of society would have a job that provided insurance to cover this and/or have made so much money in the scrabble for bucks in the free market that they could pay for it themselves.
Hyman engages, in the end, in an argument by proxy, trotting out a weak argument in the service of framing the underlying issue as one of practicality rather than ethics, knowing that only a few Americans would buy his more sincere argument, which is that we should bow down to the god of financial Darwinism and accept the blood sacrifice it requires of us.
The argument being made is essentially that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”) is, at best, unhelpful and, at worst, deadly.
Hyman begins by saying “we have the greatest healthcare in the world”-- an example of the “glittering generality” fallacy—using nice-sounding words that don’t mean anything specific.
The truth? The United States has the best healthcare in the world by exactly one metric: the cost we spend per person.
The World Health Organization, using a range of metrics measuring actual health outcomes for a nation’s citizens, ranks the U.S. 37th in the world.
Hyman then says, “To suggest people are turned away from life-saving treatment over their ability to pay is just not true.”
This is an attempt to phrase the problem in a narrow way that obscures the reality. Yes, if you collapse due to a heart attack, you will be admitted to the hospital regardless of your insurance. However, if you don’t have insurance (or have bad insurance), you will not be covered for checkups, medication, and other preventative care that would keep you from having the heart attack in the first place.
In fact, the claim that no one dies because of lack of access to healthcare was rated as a “Pants-on-Fire” lie by nonpartisan Politifact when it was recently made by a Republican politician at a town hall event.
They noted that a 2009 (i.e. pre-Affordable Care Act) study in the American Journal of Public Health concluded that a lack of health insurance "is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths in the United States, more than those caused by kidney disease.”
Politifact also pointed out that the provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance alone led to a decrease in mortality among preventable illnesses, according to a study in the journal Medical Care.
In short (and not surprisingly), having insurance saves lives. Losing it (such as would happen to millions of Americans under any of the various Republican plans that failed to pass Congress) causes deaths.
Moreover, you may face tens of thousands dollar of debt when you leave.
In fact, health-related debt has been the prime cause of personal bankruptcies. Yes, the hospital might not turn you away, but they’ll send you a bill that you (and your children) might be paying for years and years to come.
Insurance is not a panacea for health debt, but Consumer Reports notes that the passage of the ACA contributed to a dramatic reduction in personal bankruptcies. Indeed, there were only 50% the number of filings in 2016 as there were in 2010, and while other factors are likely involved in the drop, experts cited the ACA as a major factor.
So, Hyman claimed that the U.S. had the best health care system in the world, but offered no evidence to support this. And, in fact, the data shows that we lag far behind most other modern nations (and some not-so-modern nations).
He says no one is turned away from a hospital if they need treatment, but he ignores that health insurance prevents the need for emergency treatment and saves lives (and dollars). He also ignores that one health emergency in a family—even a fairly minor one—can financially devastate a family.
He then makes the claim that the ACA did not improve the health of Americans. His lone evidence for this is a fractional downtick in life expectancy from 2015 to 2016: 0.1 years, to be exact.
This statistic is interesting and worth exploring for a variety of reasons, but there is no logical reason to connect it with the ACA. This is a classic example of the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy.
Moreover, Hyman makes a tactical error in citing life expectancy as a definitive metric of healthcare policy, since this same metric directly contradicts his earlier claim that the U.S. has the “greatest health care in the world.”
In fact, according to the World Health Organization, based on data from 2000-2015 the U.S. ranks 30th in life expectancy. Every nation in Western and Northern Europe beats us, as do Japan, South Korea, and Canada. All of these nations have some version of a national healthcare system. The evidence Hyman uses actually undercuts his own argument.
Hyman concludes his argument by saying that “Government-directed healthcare can be deadly” citing as evidence the recent case of a terminally ill child in the U.K. The problem is, of course, that medical experts found that the experimental treatment had no chance of improving the life of the infant and would likely simply produce additional suffering, for a child who was already completely paralyzed, unable to breathe, severely brain damaged, deaf, and blind.
One can argue the moral merits of cases like this, but to cite it as evidence of “government-directed” healthcare being lethal is utterly dishonest (and that’s even putting aside that the ACA is not “government-directed healthcare”; it’s private healthcare purchased through markets overseen by the government).
Hyman also cites a debunked claim that President Obama told a woman during a discussion on healthcare that her elderly mother might be better off without medical treatment and simply take a pain pill instead. Again, Politifact checked this claim when a GOP congressman made it in 2009. They found rated it “False” and noted that Obama had specifically stated that bureaucrats shouldn’t make health decisions.
If you relied on the link Hyman provided to the comments, you might be excused for falling for his claim, given that the clip was creatively edited to make Obama seem to say something he wasn’t, but as is often the case, Hyman counts on his audience not knowing or caring what the facts actually are.
But (and here’s the real issue), we make a mistake to assume that the debate is over how to best provide healthcare to Americans. It’s not. As is obvious from the evidence above, the U.S. market-driven healthcare system does not lead to good results, particularly when compared with the money spent. That is obvious with anyone with eyes to see. A free-market approach to healthcare simply doesn’t work for all kinds of reasons.
But it has become clear that a certain stripe of ideological conservative does not care about this. It’s not about outcomes. It’s about keeping the “precious bodily fluids” of free-market capitalism pure. Arguments like Hyman’s are meant to scare those who might not share his ideological puritanism into thinking that even modest measures like the ACA are unhelpful and even damaging.
However, I suspect Hyman himself, were he forced to grant the validity of the objective evidence against his claims, would become a convert to the cause of universal coverage. Such free-market purists see the market as not simply a financial system but as a moral barometer. If you cannot find a way to pay for your child’s leukemia treatment, that is evidence of your own unfitness. A truly productive, successful member of society would have a job that provided insurance to cover this and/or have made so much money in the scrabble for bucks in the free market that they could pay for it themselves.
Hyman engages, in the end, in an argument by proxy, trotting out a weak argument in the service of framing the underlying issue as one of practicality rather than ethics, knowing that only a few Americans would buy his more sincere argument, which is that we should bow down to the god of financial Darwinism and accept the blood sacrifice it requires of us.
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