Supporters of more government control of healthcare have long cited high maternal mortality in the United States as a supposed reason for expanding government subsidies and regulation of the healthcare sector. But it turns out that maternal mortality actually fell to low rates and then stabilized, rather than rising. Claims that it rose were based on bad data, as a recent study confirms:
New research has found that prior studies showing high and rising rates of maternal mortality in the United States are due to flawed data.
The maternal mortality crisis in the U.S. has shown high rates of maternal deaths compared to other countries – but the study, published Wednesday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, found that data may have been classified incorrectly for two decades.
The number of women dying after giving birth in the U.S. has been concerning and raised questions about the country’s health care. While past estimates show the maternal mortality rate has more than doubled in the last two decades, this week’s study found it has remained steady.
In 2003, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recommended “pregnancy” be added to a checklist on a person’s death certificate as a way to track maternal deaths.
While there was a rapid increase in maternal mortality rates after the checklist was updated, it resulted in “some egregious errors,” including hundreds of people above the age of 70 being listed as pregnant at the time of death or shortly before their death. Deaths from other causes would be considered maternal mortality if the pregnant box was checked.
The NCHS later clarified that only women ages 15-44 should be in the category, hoping it would minimize errors going forward. Women older than 44 could be counted if there was a specific cause of death tied to a pregnancy. Otherwise, the agency counted women of birthing age the same as before.
Researchers found that despite the changes, reports still show increased maternal mortality rates or an increase in misclassified maternal deaths.
When only death certificates mentioning pregnancy as a cause of death were counted — rather than those with the “pregnancy” box checked but no mention of it as a cause of death — researchers found that maternal mortality rates lower and stabilize over time.
Americans do have shorter lifespans than people in many European and East Asian countries, though. This gap has grown even as government control of America’s healthcare sector has increased through the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. U.S. life expectancy is now 76.4 years, compared to 78.84 years back in 2014. Americans’ life spans are as short now as they were back in the 1990s.
Americans can now expect to live two years less than they would have back in 2014, when the core elements of Obamacare went into effect.
Americans’ health has thus declined even as the provisions of Obama’s healthcare law — the Affordable Care Act — were supposed to have been helping. Life expectancy shrank in 2015, for the first time in many years. As ABC News warned then, “A decades-long trend of rising life expectancy in the U.S. could be ending: It declined last year and it is no better than it was four years ago.”
The Economic Policy Journal predicted in 2012 that “life expectancy will decline under Obamacare.” In 2009, the dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, said Obamacare would cost lives by harming life-saving medical innovation. In 2013, two physicians wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Obamacare is “bad for your health,” and would hamper medical innovation by driving down investment in medical devices.
Architects of Obamacare predicted it would save lives by expanding Medicaid. But despite its large cost of billions of dollars annually, expanding Medicaid does little to improve health outcomes for recipients. As Bloomberg News’ Megan McArdle noted, an expansion of Medicaid eligibility in Oregon had “no impact on objective measures of health” for recipients. As a study in the New England Journal of Medicine pointed out, “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years,” even though “it did increase use of health care services.”
Obamacare’s architects claimed it would not increase the budget deficit, despite its huge cost, because the healthcare law contained provisions largely nationalizing the student loan industry, to grab more revenue for the government. But the Biden administration used its control over student loans to write off $519 billion in student loans, at taxpayer expense, in Biden’s August 2022 student loan forgiveness plan. That $519 billion was to be added to the budget deficit, causing America’s national debt to skyrocket. Biden also made changes to the income-driven repayment program that could increase the cost of his student-loan plan to over $1 trillion. The Supreme Court blocked Biden’s original attempt to write off over $500 billion in student loans, finding he lacked the authority to issue blanket forgiveness of student loans. But after it did so, Biden just came up with an alternative plan to forgive hundreds of billions in loans, which is expected to go into effect next year. Court challenges are also expected to be brought against it.
Biden’s separate plan to increase costs to taxpayers by $500 billion or more through changes to the income-driven repayment program remains in effect, driving up the skyrocketing budget deficit.
Obamacare backers claimed that by “nationalizing the student lending industry…Obamacare would raise $58 billion in revenue over a decade,” notes the Washington Examiner. But it didn’t. Student loans had become a money-loser, even before Biden tried to forgive any student loans at taxpayer expense. As Ben Johnson of the Acton Institute notes, a “Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in July [2022] found the Department of Education predicted that student loans would generate $114 billion for the federal government; they instead lost $197 billion — a $311 billion error, mostly due to incorrect analysis.”
