We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.Mitt Romney today. Actually, about 26,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have health insurance, so Romney is flatly wrong (and, in our eyes, being a bit disrespectful to about 26,000 American families). He also said that “we don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack.’” source
6M Americans per year will pay a penalty under the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, according to a new CBO estimate
$8B in additional revenue per year will be collected via these penalties source
» But if one does hit NYC, it’ll cost a bundle: CoreLogic, a data-analysis firm, estimates that the area most in danger of major financial loss if a hurricane hits it is New York City — with some estimates reaching as high as $100 billion in insured losses. To give you an idea of how bad it could be in NYC, Hurricane Irene, which was a fairly minor tropical storm when it hit the city last summer, still caused $6 billion in damage in the New York/New Jersey region.
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» A new study with broad ramifications: The results of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s study may seem obvious, but the debate on whether or not to cut funding for Medicaid has long rested on whether experts thought low-income people would actually use the public form of medical insurance. The new study proves this is the case, and does it in an interesting way — rather than comparing the insured to the uninsured (a common tactic used before), the study treated Medicaid the same way researchers might treat a drug. The result? Fellow researchers are hailing the study as “historic” and say it’ll shape national health care debates for years to come.
That’s the high-end estimate, thankfully. The study by the Department of Health and Human Services, aimed at Americans under 65, does state a low-end estimate of 50 million, but notwithstanding- that’s a whole lot of sick.
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