If You Own a Gun, Should You Pay More for Health Care?
Jonathan Chait at The New Republic calls it the “The NRA Health Care Loophole.” He writes that the National Rifle Association (NRA) successfully lobbied to include a provision in the health reform law prohibiting insurance companies from raising premiums for people with guns in their homes.
From this you might suppose that insurers charge higher premiums to gun owners today. They don’t. But the left is obsessed with guns as opposed to, say, swimming pools — despite the fact that almost 6 times as many people die by accidental drowning as in firearms accidents.
Chait asserts that “a huge portion” of the “conservative backlash against health care reform was premised on the notion that reform would force people who choose to lead healthy, responsible lives to subsidize bad decisions by fat, lazy slobs.” But there is an even more egregious subsidy, according to Chait. He claims that “people who keep guns in their home are choosing to run the risk of injury or death.” And that “[g]un owners are eleven times more likely to have a household member attempt suicide, and four times more likely to suffer an accidental homicide or shooting injury than to successfully use the gun in self-defense.” Where, he asks, is the conservative outrage over this subsidy?
People philosophically opposed to gun ownership have spent more than 20 years trying to position it as a health risk. In the course of their campaign, they funded a collection of widely cited but empirically shaky academic studies engineered to give credence to their claims. [Selected examples and discussion are here, here, here, and here.]
Chait has decided the time is ripe to blow the dust off those moldy statistics and revive the effort to control guns. ObamaCare provides the vehicle for this because the law gives political functionaries wide latitude to define both real and imagined health risks and to force people to pay for them.
Chait also claims that “accidental homicides” or shooting injuries were four times more likely than successfully using a gun in self-defense. To the contrary, Gary Kleck’s 1995 estimates suggest that defensive hand gun use saves more than 250,000 lives a year. And when gun ownership discourages intruders from entering homes when owners are likely to be present, gun ownership lowers assaults, and therefore injuries. In 1997, Kleck estimated that gun ownership deterred more than 450,000 burglaries in homes where the owner was present.
How much risk are people who keep guns really incurring?
If accidental gun deaths in the United States in 2006 are used as the measure, the data suggest that it is safer to own a gun than to ride a bike.
Source: National Vital Statistics Reports, Table 13, page 52. For total deaths, see Table 18, page 89.
Linda, if anything, insurance companies want you to die from firearms. Once you’re dead, you don’t cost the health insurance companies a dime. The real number to look at isn’t fatalities, but serious injuries. What are those statistics?
Isn’t this something the market can decide? I don’t agree with the NRA or the other side.
artk, isn’t that a little over the top? Insurance companies may profit from a bullet that kills vis-s-vis one that merely maims. But “insurance companies want you to die..”?
I doubt that the people at insurance companies wish for another person’s death. I think that it is irresponsible to assert that they do.
This is an interesting post. If owning a gun is a constitutional right, then it doesn’t seem right for insurance companies to increase your premium just because you own one.
I thought this post about healthcare was interesting as well.
Linda, insurance companies neither like or dislike you, you’re simply a P&L entry. A gunshot that immediately kills you is more profitable then one that injures you. Let’s get back to the question at hand, what’s the cost of medical care for gunshots wounds, fatal or not vs the cost of drownings?
Artk, if you have health insurance were you asked if you owned a gun before the company issued the policy? If not, it suggests that gun ownership doesn’t work as an indicator of risk.
Maybe gun ownership is so widespread in the US that it doesn’t matter. Maybe gun owners who also have health insurance are not inclined to end up with gunshot injuries. We know that the risk profile of those who are insured and uninsured differs.
I’ve never seen what I would consider reliable statistics on the cost of treating gunshot injuries versus the cost of aquatic accidents (which would be the proper comparator as opposed to drownings), so the answer to your question is that I don’t know.
It isn’t clear that an insurance company profits more if I die. Surely a continued stream of premium payments from me would be preferable, especially if the gunshot wound isn’t of the type that is permanently disabling.
Lucy: Your constitutional rights have no bearing on the price you pay for things. You have to pay to buy a gun: Your right doesn’t compel taxpayers to give it to you for “free”. Similarly, if you want to join a a religious community that tithes, you cannot go to the government and demand that it force the religious community to allow you to participate for “free.”
In fact, insurance in a free society will certainly price premiums differently according to how you exercise your rights. You have the right to eat, smoke, and drink as much and exercise as little as you want – and those choices will change your premiums (in a free society. Under ObamaCare the costs will appear elsewhere, e.g. in reduced wages or unemployment.)
As Linda Gorman also points out, health insurers in the individual market generally do not use gun ownership as an underwriting factor, meaning it is not important. If artk were correct, they would charge lower premiums to gun owners, ceteris paribus. If Chait were correct, they would charge them higher premiums.
An alternative counterfactual would be if health plans gave their beneficiaries discount coupons to buy guns or ammo, which they do not, thus debunking artk!
Linda, while we at it, I noticed that you used the “accidental” gunshot death statistic. The most recent statistics I’ve seen are there are 24,000 non fatal accidental gunshot injuries every year as well as some 16,000 gun suicides. That gunshot injury rate is about the same as the annual new smoking related stomach cancers. Both cigarettes and guns are legal products. If you advocate higher insurance rates for cigarette smokers because of elevated health risks, why not for gun owners?
I am using the federal terminology. For public health programs dedicated to preventing accidental injury or death, accidental gunshot deaths obviously differ from homicides using guns and suicides using guns and should be classified accordingly. It is not appropriate to lump them with cancer deaths.
Artk, could you please tell me where you saw the nonfatal accidental gunshot injury statistics?
Doesn’t anyone find it interesting that almost nobody ever seems to bring up any sort of statistics on how many lives are saved, assaults (and related injuries), are averted by people owning and (especially) carrying firearms?
It is treated as if there are only negatives to the responsible “keeping” and “bearing” of firearms. The factual statistics on the many positive aspects of such responsible activity are just brushed under the rug.
Think about this:
a. The number of physicians in the US is 700,000.
b. Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year is 120,000.
c. Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171. (US Dept. of Health & Human Services)
Then think about this:
a. The number of gun owners in the US is 80,000,000.
b. The number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups) is 1,500.
c. The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .0000188.
Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
fatchicksdigus–
The 120,000 accidental deaths by physicians number, if derived by extrapolation from the IOM medical errors study, is not a reliable statistic. Discussions of the original IOM report suggest that it overstated deaths from medical error. Also, as the latest available US Vital Statistics report puts accidental firearms deaths at 642 in 2006, would you please provide a reference to the 1,500 deaths statistic?