Here’s an interesting finding to ponder as we wrap up the work week, from Brian Frankie in The Federalist:

We know that the same year Obamacare’s insurance expansion provisions took effect, there was a pronounced, and statistically significant, surge in U.S. adult mortality. We know the surge in mortality remains after removing drug-related deaths, and other external morbidity causes, from the statistics. That is all we know. The rest is speculation. But it is fascinating speculation.

Has Obamacare, or some of the secondary effects of Obamacare, actually caused the negative impact in U.S. adult mortality so evident in the statistics? Is the improvement in public health that was assured turned out simply to be another false Obamacare promise, like being able to keep our doctors and health plans, or reducing our health costs?

As with the infamous ObamaStimulus metric of jobs “saved or created,” supporters of the O will insist that we cannot possibly know what mortality rates would have been like had ObamaCare never passed.  That’s a nifty trick to never have to truly subject one’s policies to real-world assessment, but serious discussion would require finding some evidence that an even bigger surge came in low.

I’m not saying I’ve got any answers on a Friday afternoon, but I certainly find it plausible that ObamaCare actually killed thousands of people (to put it in not-at-all-inflammatory terms).  Medicaid has worse health outcomes than private health insurance, even than no coverage at all, so people ushered onto Medicaid would be expected to increase mortality rates, especially if they’d planned to buy private health insurance through an exchange and discovered their eligibility for the free version.

Whatever the cause, we should certainly get past the simplistic public debate that saving ObamaCare saves lives and trying to eliminate (or even substantially reform) it is an inhumane goal.