Thursday, June 19, 2008

Worst Study Award

By John Goodman

One of these days I'm going to announce the winners of my "worst study award" contest. In the meantime, the Commonwealth Fund submitted another entry. The study is an update of a previous entry, this time claiming there are 25 million "underinsured" Americans.

After reeling from the sheer size of that number, my first question was: How many Americans are overinsured?…. Overinsured?…. Yes, overinsured. Since CWF claims that the primary reason for underinsurance is high deductibles and since the primary reason for a high deductible is to reduce the degree of overinsurance, one can't adequately study one problem without studying the other.