When more people have health insurance, do death rates drop? A growing body of research—including that of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Benjamin Sommers—points to a link.
A Nov. 9 Washington Post article highlighted several studies suggesting that giving more people access to health insurance decreases deaths. One of the studies mentioned in the article—co-authored by Sommers, Huntley Quelch Professor of Health Care Economics, and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber in 2019—was a review of the literature on how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) impacted health outcomes. A number of the studies they evaluated found that states that chose to expand Medicaid under the ACA saw significantly fewer deaths following the change.
The article also cited 2019 research based on data from the Internal Revenue Service. The agency had unintentionally created a randomized experiment in 2017 when it sent letters to several million Americans who’d paid a tax penalty two years earlier for failing to get health insurance under a then-mandate from the ACA. The letter urged recipients to consider signing up for health insurance—but 15% of those who’d been penalized didn’t get a letter. Researchers later compared the two groups and found a much lower mortality rate over the next two years among those who received letters and decided to get insured.
Sommers told the Washington Post that the IRS data provided further compelling evidence of the link between health insurance and decreased mortality. “The IRS study finished it for me,” he said. “I don’t have much doubt in my mind anymore.”
Read the Washington Post article: Is health insurance a matter of life and death? Scientists may have an answer.
