TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

A new study, with strong statistical controls, found no elevated risk of death for the uninsured:

The possibility that no one risks death by going without health insurance may be startling, but some research supports it. Richard Kronick of the University of California at San Diego’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, an adviser to the Clinton administration, recently published the results of what may be the largest and most comprehensive analysis yet done of the effect of insurance on mortality. He used a sample of more than 600,000, and controlled not only for the standard factors, but for how long the subjects went without insurance, whether their disease was particularly amenable to early intervention, and even whether they lived in a mobile home. In test after test, he found no significantly elevated risk of death among the uninsured.

It’s important, too, to keep in mind that a correlation between lack of insurance and a higher rate of mortality doesn’t indicate causation. Megan Mcardle explains:

The bigger problem is that the uninsured generally have more health risks than the rest of the population. They are poorer, more likely to smoke, less educated, more likely to be unemployed, more likely to be obese, and so forth. All these things are known to increase your risk of dying, independent of your insurance status.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we don’t need health care reform. We absolutely do. But it does mean that claiming hundreds of thousands of people will die due to opposition to the Democrats’ health care bill is sensationalistic, an appeal to emotion rather than fact and logic, and not an attempt at meaningful and substantive discussion.