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The Uninsured: A Literature Review

Decent Essays
Regarding average population health, it is unclear from the existing literature whether expanding access to health care would have a significant influence. One way to improve access to health care is expanding insurance coverage, but Levy and Meltzer found “very little convincing evidence to demonstrate that having health insurance improves population health on average” (403). However, for some vulnerable subpopulations, there were marked health benefits (406). McKinlay and McKinlay argue that medical care itself accounts for a small part in the decline of mortality in the United States, noting that the “rise in medical care expenditures began when nearly all (92 percent) of the modern decline in mortality this century had already occurred” (414). However, it is important to keep in mind that the McKinlay’s studied the decline of mortality in the twentieth century, and with the elimination of most widespread infectious…show more content…
2016 “The Uninsured: A Primer” article should be cut because of its length and redundancy within the context of the course. This 18-page document is double the length of the 9-page OHIE article, and much—if not all—of the content within the Majerol article is already covered in lecture via Professor Beckfield’s overview of the ACA and in Gaffney and McCormick’s article in the Lancet, a more current analysis of the implications of the ACA on the uninsured than the Majerol article provides. The OHIE can be incorporated into this course’s discussion section further by putting the proposed Baicker article side-by-side with the Levy and Meltzer article and predict how Levy and Meltzer would respond to the Baicker article. Outside of the nonsignificant results from physical measures of health, self-rated health improved, but one could be hesitant to accept this result because of the lack of a double-blind experiment, so self-rated health could in fact be mimicking the placebo
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