Hispanics: Longer Life Expectancy, Less Insurance
John Goodman points out on The Health Care Blog that Hispanics live longer than non-Hispanic whites on average, and the table above based on CDC data shows that life expectancy is greater for Hispanics than for whites both at birth (by 2.5 years), but also at other selected ages (20, 40, 60 and 80 years). At the same time, Census data for 2009 shows that only about two out of every three Hispanics is covered by health insurance, compared to 88% of whites being covered, so that Hispanics are almost three times as likely as whites to be uninsured (32.4% vs. 12%).
John concludes that these findings "make mincemeat out of the oft-repeated idea that the uninsured get less health care and die earlier than everyone else."
5 Comments:
It only makes "mincemeat" out of that argument if you ignore the fact that those statistics don't control for lifestyle, cultural, dietary, and genetics differences between the two populations.
That is an extremely bad conclusion to draw from the evidence presented.
Politically incorrect.
We all know that without "healthcare"
we would all be dead tomorrow.
One problem with the CDC data is that it did not control for selectivity bias. A significant portion of the U.S. Hispanic population is comprised of immigrants who came here to work. We should expect that such immigrants were more likely to be healthy enough to work when they arrived here. The less healthy population of Mexico, Costa Rica, and other Latin American nations would never have made the trip.
We should also expect that many immigrants who become unhealthy after arrival in the U.S. will choose to return to native countries - either to be with family or just to die in their homeland.
I don't know if the CDC is able to separate native U.S. Hispanic mortality data from immigrant Hispanic mortality data. If so, I expect mortality statistics would reveal the selectivity bias I described.
What Jet Beagle said.
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