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Private health insurance is killing the middle aged in America. [1]

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Date: 2023-08-01  

Over the last two years I have produced more than 3,000 graphs and an enumerable number of statistical tables looking for the cause or causes of the United States’ alarmingly high death rate. We are currently ranked 46th in the world in terms of life expectancy according to the CIA’s world fact book. This simple analysis shows the most important thing I have found: that how healthcare is paid for is the single most determinant factor in change of death rates. Each dot on the graph shows the age group’s total percent change in death rates for each year since 1999. It transpires, that the major cause of our high death rate is not directly measured but, the strongest indicator is the difference in the way health care is paid for by our elderly versus our middle age populations. This is due to private health insurance companies denying people care, being unaffordable, canceling policies, raising deductibles, and systematically determining who should receive coverage and care. In 2007 the health care industry implemented a system by which they could deny care on an individual basis. Prior to this, there was an arbitrary system dependent upon doctor’s requests and insurance approval which was unpredictable. The pattern in the United States, where the middle aged show an increasing death rate while the elderly show a declining death rate, is probably the most abnormal pattern in death rates changes in any country in the world. Nearly all causes of death increase by age. The declining death rate in the elderly compared to the increasing death rate in the middle age is abnormal and can only be explained by differences in access to health care.

In the United States, specific age determines how health care is delivered. People under age 25 are primarily covered by their parents’ private health insurance but the uninsured can usually receive care through state funded health care. People ages 25-54 are almost exclusively covered by private health insurance [they are represented by the line of blue squares in the graph]. For people ages 55-64 care varies by state but, in most states those who need a lot of health care can usually retire early and get covered by Medicare. People over the age of 65 are almost fully covered by Social Security, which does not reserve the right to deny care. We have no way to measure differences in elderly care death rates by differences in how their health care is paid for. Of all the differences in how early people die in the United States, the major measurable difference is between those covered by private health insurance (age 25-54), and those primarily funded by Social Security, (age 65-84). I have excluded the last age group, (85+) because no one survives this age bracket and therefore its’ death rate is 100 percent.

Lastly, the data shows that by swapping the death rates for the two age groups, you clearly see how the death rates differ. If non-Hispanic whites aged 65-84 had experienced the same percent change in their death rates as ages 25-54, their number of deaths from 1999-2020 would have increased from 20,079,799 to 27,635,922 or by 7,556,123. That is a staggering 37.6 percent increase. If people ages 25-54 had experienced the changes in death rates that the elderly experienced, their number of deaths would have declined from 4,383,153 to 3,133,649, that is 1,249,153 fewer deaths, and a 26.5 percent decline.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/1/2184539/-Private-health-insurance-is-killing-the-middle-aged-in-America

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