I get the alerts from Georgetown University Center for Children and Families weekly. The news much of the time is a reflection of the number of attacks on families and children who have lesser means to provide for healthcare themselves and depend upon Medicaid, ACA, and CHIPS for care. Since the election of Trump, McConnell and Ryan have been strutting around like the cocks on the walk demonstrating their machismo as they hold women, children and families hostage. Tough guys both and it is easy to threaten women and children.

For the first time in a decade, the number of uninsured children rose in the US. It is not much of a surprise to me as Republicans made it miserable for many in states which did not expand Medicaid, held CHIPS hostage, and threatened those applied to become citizens with denial if they used the nation’s healthcare.

Some Stats:

The Georgetown University Center for Children and Families:

– An estimated 276,000 more children were uninsured in 2017 than in 2016
– Three-quarters of the children who lost coverage between 2016 and 2017 live in non-expansion Medicaid coverage states for parents and low-income adults. The uninsured rates for children increased at almost triple the rate in non-expansion states compared to Medicaid expansion states.
– Nine states experienced statistically significant increases in their rate of uninsured children (SD, UT, TX, GA, SC, FL, OH, TN, MA).
– Texas is #1 again. Texas has the largest share of children without health coverage with more than one in five uninsured children in the U.S. residing in the state.
– States with larger American Indian/ Alaska Native populations tend to have higher uninsured rates for children than the national average.

Some History:

The funding for CHIP expired September 2017 and Republicans and Trump were playing cat and mouse with Democrats to extend it while they looked for ways to repeal the ACA or weaken it. As Joan Aker the Executive Director of the Center for Children and Families stated;

“The majority of uninsured children are already eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but are not currently enrolled. The name of the game here is to make sure that families are aware that their child has a path to coverage and that these kids get enrolled and stay enrolled.”

2017 was tumultuous for families dependent on Medicaid, CHIPs, and the ACA. Added to this was Trump’s hostility towards immigrant families. 25% of the children living in the United States have a parent who is an immigrant. For “mixed status” families, the fear of interacting with the government deters them from enrolling their children in government sponsored health coverage.

Conclusion:

Again, Joan Akers of the Center for Children and Families: “The nation is going backwards on insuring kids and it is likely to get worse.”

If we can get the Democrats in the House off their butt and start to represent “their constituents” as determined by the founding fathers who designed the House to represent the population, we may be able to put in place the foundation for future healthcare gains. Instead, we have the House Representatives playing the secret ballot game for House Speaker with a promise of a Dean Wormer double-secret ballot come January.

Under Trump, Number Of Uninsured Kids Rose For First Time This Decade

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I don’t follow healthcare as much as others at this blog. I started playing around with some graphs at FRED and got a bit confused. I don’t mind being confused, but I like to clear up that confusion eventually. So perhaps someone can tell me what’s going on.

First, this graph of healthcare expenditures / GDP which seems to indicate that Obamacare bent the cost curve:

(click to embiggenize)

But looking at the annual change in healthcare expenditures / GDP, things become less clear:

(click to embiggenify)

Here, it looks like the rate of increase in costs declined through the early oughts, went up as the economy tanked (i.e., healthcare costs continued rising but GDP fell), and then stayed more or less constant (through 2014,the last year with this series).   This graph doesn’t say Obamacare didn’t help, but it doesn’t scream that it does either.

But this next graph is a real problem.  It shows healthcare expenditures per capita:

(click to embiggenificate)

The rate of at which healthcare costs per capita have been increasing have been declining since 2001…  well before PPACA took effect.  Additionally, it kind of looks like healthcare costs per capita stopped declining after the passage of PPACA.  Worse, the rate of increase of healthcare costs per capita may have begun picking up since then.  That would imply that if there was any bending of the curve, it was the wrong way.

What am I missing?

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Propublica has a story on waste in the medical industry:

Experts estimate the U.S. health care system wastes $765 billion annually — about a quarter of all the money that’s spent. Of that, an estimated $210 billion goes to unnecessary or needlessly expensive care, according to a 2012 report by the National Academy of Medicine

Having visited doctors in the past decade or two a few times, I can believe the 25% figure.  The billing structure alone creates massive amounts of waste.  But some see Propublica as overly liberal, so why not check their figures?   followed the links to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and clicked on this slideshow from 2012. Slide seven was particularly interesting. It included the following bullet points:

• Health care costs constitute 18% of U.S. GDP
• 30% increase in personal income over the past decade effectively
eliminated by a 76% increase in health care costs
• $750B in waste

Now, in 2012, the year the report was published, GDP was $16.16 trillion. If healthcare spending was 18% of that, it amounted to about $2.91 trillion. And $750B, the amounted wasted is a bit more than 25%.  Which is to say, Propublica’s numbers are in line with the National Academy’s numbers from 2012.

Which raises a question…  wasn’t the point of not moving to a single payer regime that the private sector would eliminate waste such as this?

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