Did Obamacare Really Save Lives?

One of the popular objections to the GOP proposals to reform health insurance markets is that the Affordable Care Act (aka ‘ObamaCare’) saved thousands of lives per year, and hence that tinkering with ObamaCare will literally kill lots of people. For example, Hillary Clinton tweeted out:

Now to be sure, even if the claim were true, it still wouldn’t follow that coercive redistribution of wealth was morally justified. However, as happens so often in political controversies, libertarians don’t have to choose between property rights and tolerating widespread suffering. Believe it or not, the data suggest that if anything, ObamaCare actually caused more Americans to die.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on June 30, 2017.