Senator Bernie Sanders has suspended his presidential campaign, leaving the nomination unchallenged for former Vice President Joe Biden. But you can be sure Bernie’s still pushing his progressive agenda.While Sanders wants to ram socialized medicine down our throats (Medicare for All), Joe Biden prefers to “protect and build on ObamaCare.” Is that a better choice?

ObamaCare was supposed to increase health care coverage for uninsured Americans while lowering insurance premiums by $2500 per year for everyone else. It did increase the number of Americans with healthcare coverage – but mostly by expanding Medicaid to able-bodied adult males who were never supposed to be covered in the first place. Medicaid was designed as a program for the disabled, pregnant women, adult caretakers and poor children, but ObamaCare made it available for anyone earning up to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL). The losers in this deal are the taxpayers.

Also, that $2500 reduction in your health care insurance never happened – but you know that! That’s another promise made by President Obama that never came to pass. Just like his famous promise, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

Grace-Marie Turner, writing in Forbes, gives us her top three reasons why the law failed to fulfill its political promises and why it is the wrong platform for reform:

• Health insurance premiums more than doubled – The reality is that healthcare premiums doubled in the first four years while deductibles and co-pays sky-rocketed. Many people who now are “covered” by insurance still can’t afford to visit the doctor due to the high deductibles and co-pays.
• Millions of families are losing their insurance because of costs –The people in the worst situation are those who earn more than 138% of FPL (not eligible for Medicaid) and more than 400% of FPL (not eligible for subsidies). One father in Fredericksburg, Virginia, said his health insurance premiums cost $4,000 a month. That’s more than his mortgage! No subsidies means no health insurance for his family.
• ObamaCare’s “Essential Benefits” – These requirements of every ObamaCare approved policy unnecessarily raised premiums while providing worthless benefits such as mammograms for men and prostate exams for women. To keep premiums relatively low, insurers jacked up the deductibles and co-pays to $6000 to even $10,000 per person per year. That’s really no insurance at all.

The result is the expansion of Medicaid to people who don’t really need it at a cost of billions of dollars to taxpayers. Moreover, the same taxpayers are spending billions more to provide subsidies to roughly eight million people who purchase their insurance on the exchanges. Many of these had lower cost premium plans before ObamaCare but now are forced to purchase expensive plans with benefits they don’t need.

In summary, ObamaCare has provided:

• Medicaid for people never intended to receive it
• Subsidized expensive insurance for those earning slightly more
• Unaffordable expensive insurance for those earning slightly more than that
• Unnecessarily expensive insurance for everyone

We cannot afford to “protect and build” on a healthcare plan that is fundamentally flawed, artificially expensive, and functionally useless for millions of Americans. ObamaCare is a failed healthcare system, and it’s time Joe Biden accepted this reality.

The news media loves bad news. The old saying is, “If it bleeds, it leads” when choosing the headlines for tomorrow’s newspaper. So good news is rarely welcomed.

Since the world became used to the term “Corona Virus”, there has been a consistent narrative that seeks to convince us all that the sky is falling. We’ve all been subjected to the daily White House Corona Virus Task Force briefings where reporters from the media consistently ask “gotcha” questions intended to portray the day’s events in the worst possible light. They seem convinced that the Trump administration is always try to keep them from the truth.

This same narrative has been promoted by many others in the world, including many scientists from various disciplines. Computer models have tried (unsuccessfully) to predict the number of infections and deaths that can be expected. Perhaps the worst of these was the Imperial College of London, which predicted more than 2.2 million corona virus deaths in the U.S. absent “any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behavior.” The study was published March 16 – the same day the Trump administration announced its “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative, which included strict social-distancing guidelines.

I confess I have been skeptical of this doomsday narrative ever since I first studied the rates of symptomatic infection compared to asymptomatic infection and the percentages of those infected requiring medical treatment. Early reports that 80% of those infected could be treated at home reassured me this was not greatly dissimilar to influenza. The more we learn about this virus, the more these first impressions have been validated.

But now comes similar conclusions from a scientist much more qualified than me. Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, is a world-renowned expert in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. He has published more than 1,000 papers, including many meta-analyses or reviews of other studies. Despite these impressive credentials, Dr. Ioannidus is being heavily criticized for his views on the corona virus because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In my last post, Corona Virus Less Deadly Than Expected, I reported on a study from Stanford University that showed the prevalence of Covid-19 infection in the Santa Clara County, California community was 50 – 85 times as high as expected which lowered the mortality rate of the virus to between 0.12% to 0.2%, making it comparable to a typical seasonal influenza epidemic. The Stanford study was by Dr. Ioannidus and his colleagues.

Since that study was reported, two other studies have duplicated their results. The University of Southern California and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health released their study findings that estimated the virus is 28 to 55 times as prevalent in that county as confirmed cases are. A New York study released last week estimated that 13.9% of the state and 21.2% of the city had been infected, or more than 10 times the number of confirmed cases. Both of these studies confirm that the mortality rate of Covid-19 is substantially lower than previously estimated, and more consistent with many influenza epidemics.

Naturally, the news media has tried to discredit these studies because they don’t support the “sky is falling” narrative. Allysia Finley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, interviewed Dr. Ioannidus and he explains their reaction:“There’s some sort of mob mentality here operating that they just insist that this has to be the end of the world, and it has to be that the sky is falling. It’s attacking studies with data based on speculation and science fiction. But dismissing real data in favor of mathematical speculation is mind-boggling.”

Finley points out that the news is filled with stories of healthy young people who die of coronavirus. But Dr. Ioannidus recently published a paper with his wife, Despina Contopoulos-Ioannidus, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford, that showed this to be a classic “man bites dog” story. The couple found that people under 65 without underlying conditions accounted for only 0.7% of corona virus deaths in Italy and 1.8% in New York City.

Dr. Ioannidus explains, “Compared to almost any other cause of disease that I can think of, it’s really sparing young people. I’m not saying that the lives of 80-year-olds do not have value – they do. But there’s far, far, far more young people who commit suicide.” If the panic and attendant disruption continue, he says, “We will see many young people committing suicide . . . just because we are spreading horror stories with Covid-19. There’s far, far more young people who get cancer and will not be treated, because again, they will not go to the hospital to get treated because of Covid-19. There’s far, far more people whose mental health will collapse.”

What about the lockdowns? They have been promoted as a way to “slow the spread” of the virus in an effort to prevent the overloading of the healthcare system that might have led to healthcare rationing. Fortunately, this has not happened. Despite all the rhetoric, there are no instances when rationing of hospital beds or ventilators has been reported. For this we can be grateful.

But lockdowns are a temporary solution. Dr. Ioannidus says, “People are making big statements about ‘lockdowns save the world.’ I think that they’re immature. They’re tremendously immature. They may have worked in some cases, they may have had no effect in others, and they may have been damaging still in others.”

He says most disagreements among scientists reflect differences in perspective, not facts. Some find the Stanford study worrisome because it suggests the virus is more easily transmitted, while others are hopeful because it suggests the virus is far less lethal. “It’s basically an issue of whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Even scientists can be optimists and pessimists. Probably usually I’m a pessimist, but in this case, I’m probably an optimist.”

Count me with him.

When the newest corona virus, COVID-19, was released into the world from China there was little known about it. Most of our information necessarily came from China, an authoritarian government not known for its transparency. Assumptions were necessary based on the Chinese experience and data was inserted into computer models to predict the possible outcomes of this new viral pandemic.

Some of those models predicted up to 500,000 deaths in the United Kingdom and up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States. With time, these models were adjusted and the number of predicted deaths plummeted to still frightening numbers of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the U.S. Eventually the models brought the numbers below 100,000. As I write these words, the number of deaths in the U.S. has reached 39,000. While that’s still a lot of people, it’s a long way from 2.2 million and actually represents fewer deaths thus far from COVID-19 than some years from influenza (2017 – 61,000 deaths from influenza).

The mortality rate of COVID-19 has been estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) at 3.4%. The accuracy of this number depends entirely on knowing the number of people who got infected but did not die. That number forms the basis of the denominator in any calculation of the mortality rate. Therefore, accuracy must be based on testing, not only those with obvious disease, but also those without symptoms, which has been unavailable to date.

All of these predictions thus far have been based on unreliable data and speculation. But now we have the first scientific study to draw more accurate conclusions. A preliminary study from Stanford University has just been released that sharply differs with previous conclusions.

Andrew Bogan, a molecular biologist writing in The Wall Street Journal, reports a seroprevalence study of Santa Clara County, California. They sampled 3,300 residents to test them for the presence of antibodies in their blood that would show if they had previously been infected with the corona virus. The researchers found the percentage of infections in the population was indeed vastly larger than the roughly 1,000 known positive cases in the county at the time of the study. This is certainly consistent with expectations since only those with viral symptoms and fever were being tested.

The preliminary results show that between 2.5% and 4.2% of county residents are estimated to have antibodies against the virus. That translates into 48,000 to 81,000 infections, 50 to 85 times as high as the number of known cases. Rather than being frightening, this is great news. It means thousands of people are experiencing infection by the virus without ever knowing it – and that means the mortality rate is much, much lower than expected.

Based on this seroprevalence data, the authors estimate that in Santa Clara County the true infection fatality rate is somewhere in the range of 0.12% to 0.2%. This is much closer to the seasonal influenza rates than to the original, case-based estimates.

This is not to suggest that COVID-19 is not a serious viral disease nor to imply that precautions were unnecessary. There can be no doubt that it has taken a significant world-wide toll of human lives. At this writing the number of world-wide deaths has reached 161,904. Until there is an effective vaccine, there will continue to be a real and present danger especially to those who are elderly, immunosuppressed, or have significant other medical co-morbidities including heart disease, COPD, and diabetes.

However, given what we now know about the virus and its lethality, in the future we can make better policy decisions designed to protect the most vulnerable while maintaining some semblance of normalcy that does not destroy the economy. We certainly don’t take draconian steps to prevent the spread of influenza, which in some seasons has been even more lethal than COVID-19.