Tag Archives: health

Study: Health Care Reform Likely to Reduce Bankruptcy and Catastrophic Debt

by CaridadBollinge Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today’s email brings word of an interesting new paper from Bhashkar Mazumder of the Chicago Fed and Sarah Miller of Notre Dame. They set out to measure the effect of the Massachusetts health care reform on bankruptcy and personal debt, a subject that’s topical for a number of reasons:

The Massachusetts plan is quite similar to Obamacare, so results from this study are suggestive of the impact that Obamacare will eventually have.
One of the primary purposes of universal health insurance is to relieve the financial stress of large unpaid medical bills.
Massachusetts is a good case study because its reform affected everyone, not just those below the poverty line.

The authors take advantage of the fact that health care reform had bigger effects on some groups than others. Most middle-aged people, for example, were already insured, so the Massachusetts reform affected them only modestly. Conversely, young people had relatively low insurance rates, so they were more heavily affected. Ditto for counties, some of which had higher initial rates of uninsurance than others.

The study exploits a very large data set of consumer finance based on reporting from credit bureaus, which provided a sample of nearly 400,000 individuals to look at. Its conclusion is unsurprising:

We find that the reform significantly improved credit scores, reduced the total amount past due, reduced the fraction of debt past due, and reduced the probability of personal bankruptcy. We find particularly pronounced reductions in the probability of having a large delinquency of over $5,000. These effects tend to be larger among individuals whose credit scores were low at the time of the reform, suggesting that the greatest gains in financial security occurred among those who were already struggling financially.

The charts below, excerpted from the study, illustrate the effect of health care reform, which was implemented in the period shown by the yellow bars. Despite the severe recession that followed, the amount of current debt stayed pretty flat while the amount of debt more than $10,000 past due declined sharply. Obamacare is not as universal as the Massachusetts reform, so its effects will probably be less pronounced. Nonetheless, it will not only provide routine health care for millions of Americans who aren’t currently getting it, it will also make their lives far less financially precarious. That sounds like a win to me.

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Study: Health Care Reform Likely to Reduce Bankruptcy and Catastrophic Debt

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Let’s Get Our Obamacare Story Straight, Folks

by KaseyF15hapa Posted on February 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Having just berated the nation’s news media for credulously reporting that Obamacare would result in the “loss” of 2 million jobs, I want to push back a bit in the other direction too. Here is Paul Krugman explaining that Obamacare doesn’t destroy jobs, but it does give people more freedom to work fewer hours without fear of losing access to the health care system:

The basic point here is that we started with a system in which incentives were already strongly distorted by the deductibility of employer-paid health insurance premiums. This was a significant benefit, but one in general available only to full-time workers….What we had here was [] a system in which subsidies were available only if you worked more than a certain amount, surely leading some people to work more than they would have wanted to otherwise.

And that’s not a hypothetical — I know a fair number of people in just that situation. I also know some people in “job lock” — feeling trapped in their current job because they aren’t sure they could get implicitly subsidized health insurance if they moved.

Plenty of other liberals have made similar points, and there’s no question that there’s a kernel of truth to it. Someone who’s 62 might retire early because they know they can buy health insurance while they wait for Medicare to kick in. A young worker who wants to start up her own company might be more likely to do it knowing that she can still get coverage for a pre-existing condition. People who lose their jobs might hold out longer for good replacements if they know they can continue to get affordable health coverage while they look.

But the CBO report was pretty clear that this is not really the main channel by which Obamacare reduces employment. It mostly reduces total hours of employment among the poor, which is why it estimates that employment will go down 2 percent but total compensation will only go down 1 percent. And the channel for this reduction is straightforward: workers lose Obamacare subsidies as their incomes go up, which makes it less attractive to work more hours. For instance, if you go from 135 percent of the poverty line to 140 percent of the poverty line—something that could happen by the addition of a mere two or three hours of work a week—you might lose access to Medicaid.

More generally, the problem is that Obamacare subsidies decline smoothly as your income goes up. Here’s an example. If you and your partner earn $10 per hour and your family income is $30,000, you’ll pay about $1,250 out of pocket for health insurance. Subsidies cover the rest. But if you work an extra six hours a week and increase your income to $33,000, your premium cost goes up to about $1,600. That’s not a huge difference, but it means that effectively you’re only making $8.80 for each of those extra hours you work. At the margins, there will always be a few people who decide that’s not worth it, and will decide to keep their old hours. That’s especially true since their family now has health coverage and doesn’t have to worry quite so much about catastrophic expenses.

You can decide for yourself whether this is good or bad. In any case, it’s not something unique to Obamacare. It’s a feature of every means-tested welfare program ever. And it’s the main reason that employment will decline. Not because of early retirees or folks who are now free to tell their bosses to take this job and shove it. It’s mainly because it will cause a certain number of poor people to decide that working extra hours doesn’t pay enough to be worth it.

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Let’s Get Our Obamacare Story Straight, Folks

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15 Surprising Uses for Coconut Oil

by OmarMLWtombw Posted on February 5, 2014

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15 Surprising Uses for Coconut Oil

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What Happens After the Novelty of Fitness Gadgets Wears Off?

by agustinmeadows7766 Posted on February 4, 2014

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What Happens After the Novelty of Fitness Gadgets Wears Off?

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Barbie Designer: If We Made Her Look Normal, Her Clothes Wouldn’t Fit

by JosefHueber Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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By now, it’s well known that Barbie’s body isn’t exactly realistic. If the famous doll were human, her waist would be just 16 inches around—half the size of the average American woman’s. She hasn’t always been this way; in fact, before 1997, Barbie was even less realistic.

In an interview with Fast Company Design, Kim Culmone, vice president of design for the Barbie doll, spoke candidly about why the doll remains so proportionally different from real women. Her argument essentially boiled down to: We can’t make Barbie more realistic because her clothes wouldn’t fit anymore.

Co.Design: What’s your stance on Barbie’s proportions?

Culmone: Barbie’s body was never designed to be realistic. She was designed for girls to easily dress and undress. And she’s had many bodies over the years, ones that are poseable, ones that are cut for princess cuts, ones that are more realistic…Primarily it’s for function for the little girl, for real life fabrics to be able to be turned and sewn, and have the outfit still fall property on her body.

Co.Design: So to get the clean lines of fashion at Barbie’s scale, you have to use totally unrealistic proportions?

Culmone: You do! Because if you’re going to take a fabric that’s made for us…her body has to be able to accommodate how the clothes will fit her.

In actuality, Barbie was created in 1959 so that the daughter of Ruth Handler, co-founder of the Mattel toy company, could imagine herself as an adult. In 1977, Handler told the New York Times she invented Barbie because “every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future.”

When asked whether she thinks girls compare their own bodies to Barbie’s, Culmone said no way.

Co.Design: You don’t think there’s a body comparison going on when you’re a girl?

Culmone: I don’t. Girls view the world completely differently than grown-ups do…Clearly, the influences for girls on those types of issues, whether it’s body image or anything else, it’s proven, it’s peers, moms, parents, it’s their social circles.

When they’re playing, they’re playing. It’s a princess-fairy-fashionista-doctor-astronaut, and that’s all one girl.

But a 2006 study in the American Psychological Association found that girls exposed to Barbie had lower self esteem and a desire to be thinner. Another 2006 study showed that young girls ate significantly more after playing with average-sized dolls.

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Barbie Designer: If We Made Her Look Normal, Her Clothes Wouldn’t Fit

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Here’s What We Can Learn About Health Care From the Mortgage Crisis

by ColemanKrauss Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Health care isn’t the first boon that President Obama tried to give us through a public-private partnership. When he took office, more than 25% of US home mortgages were underwater—meaning that people owed more on their houses than they could get if they tried to sell them. The president offered those homeowners debt relief through banks. Now he’s offering health care through insurance companies.

In both cases, the administration shied away from direct government aid. Instead, it subsidized private companies to serve the people. To get your government-subsidized mortgage modification, you applied at your bank; to get your government-mandated health coverage, you buy private insurance.

Let a Hundred Middlemen Bloom

In other countries with national health plans, a variety of independent health care providers—hospitals, doctors, and clinics, among others—deliver medical care, while the government doles out the compensation. They let a hundred healthcare providers bloom, but there’s only a single payer. If the US moved to single-payer healthcare, however, what would happen to the private health insurance business?

In the 1990s, the conservative Heritage Foundation floated the idea of extending health coverage to more Americans via government exchanges or “connectors” that would funnel individual buyers to competing, for-profit health insurance companies. In other words, let a hundred middlemen bloom.

On the face of it, such a plan would seem expensive, since it means supporting two bureaucracies, one of which would be obliged to take profits for investors. Meanwhile, doctors would still have the expense of trying to collect from multiple insurers with reasons to stall. But the Heritage plan had one great advantage. Since Harry Truman, American presidents have tried unsuccessfully to get us national health care. The exchange system, however awkward it might be, pacified the insurance companies which had previously spent millions of dollars to defeat other plans for “socialized medicine.” With the support of those companies for a program that not only kept them in the picture, but also promised to deliver millions of new, subsidized customers to them, Obama gave us a national healthcare law.

The danger is that it essentially makes insurance companies our medical receptionists, a profit-making face that greets sick people whenever they try to use their government healthcare. That gives private companies a lot of power to make the government look bad.

That’s why it’s important to understand how banks used Obama’s mortgage subsidy program to sabotage debt relief and discredit government. If we grasp how they pulled that off, we may be able to protect the present health plan and someday even get genuine single-payer healthcare out of it. So here’s the story.

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Here’s What We Can Learn About Health Care From the Mortgage Crisis

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Quick Reads: "Extreme Medicine" by Kevin Fong

by ESGMarie Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Extreme Medicine

By Kevin Fong

THE PENGUIN PRESS

The devil’s in the physiological details as physician, NASA adviser, and outdoor fanatic Kevin Fong explores how feats at the edge of possibility—from the first major Antarctica expedition a century ago to the first manned landing on Mars at some future date—rely upon and, in turn, inform an ever-greater understanding of our own biology. With clear, evocative prose, he takes readers to ocean depths and mountaintops, and also deep within our bodies, in this entertaining exploration of human limits.

This review originally appeared in our January/February 2014 issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "Extreme Medicine" by Kevin Fong

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Make Stem Cells in 30 Minutes, Just Add Acid

by SybilTrevino Posted on February 2, 2014

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Make Stem Cells in 30 Minutes, Just Add Acid

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Conservatives Don’t Want You To Eat Pro-Abortion Girl Scout Cookies

by MargartDunaway Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s time for the annual Girl Scout cookie freak out! This year, it’s not due to the palm oil used to produce the treats, nor the group’s policy on transgender members: This time, Girl Scouts are supposedly too pro-abortion.

As Think Progress reports, in December, Girl Scouts tweeted a link to a Huffington Post story extolling Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (of anti-abortion bill filibuster fame) as a candidate for “Woman of the Year.”

And in a Facebook post, the organization linked to a Washington Post list of “Seven American Women Who Made a Difference in 2013,” including US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. These links were enough to spur John Pisciotta, who runs Pro-Life Waco, to launch a national boycott. “The Girl Scouts were once a truly amazing organization, but it has been taken over by idealogues of the left, and regular folk just won’t stand for it,” Pisciotta told Breitbart News. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly also took up the cause with a full-on panel on the offending tweet.

Ultimately, though, the campaign is about more than a couple of social-media postings: On its website, the “CookieCott 2014” campaign argues that the boycott is a protest of the Girl Scouts’ “deep and lasting entanglement with abortion providers and abortion rights organizations.” This includes, it claims, promoting role models like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Hillary Clinton, Amnesty International, ACLU, and the National Organization of Women, and supporting “youth reproductive/abortion and sexual rights” via its membership in the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.

The bullying seems to have worked: In a blog post Wednesday, Girl Scouts offered “our sincerest apologies,” noting, “To be clear, Girl Scouts has not endorsed any person or organization.” Is that sort of meekness is consistent with the organization’s quest to “build girls of courage, confidence, and character”? Ponder that while you try to resist those Samoas.

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Conservatives Don’t Want You To Eat Pro-Abortion Girl Scout Cookies

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

by ild4sho Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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When I was a teenager, I drank a lot of milk. That made my bones strong, which is why I’ve been able to avoid fracturing my hip now that I’m over 50. Hooray for milk!

Except wait. Science™ has intruded on this idyllic marketing fantasy:

Researchers followed people for 22 years to see if drinking milk as a teenager affected the rate of hip fractures during the study period. What did they find? There were more than 1200 hip fractures in women and almost 500 hip fractures in men in the follow-up period. But it turns out that each additional glass of milk per day as teenagers was associated with a 9% HIGHER risk of hip fractures in men later in life. Drinking more milk had no effect in women.

In other words, regardless of what the ads say, as a teen there’s no protective effect of your “bones getting stronger” in terms of preventing hip fractures later in life by drinking milk. In fact, the evidence shows that it may make it more likely that males will develop hip fractures.

That’s a helluva thing, isn’t it? That Aaron Carroll is a real killjoy.

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Milk Doesn’t Do a Body So Good After All

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