Megan McArdle revisits her health-care predictions (discussed in my lengthy post on life-expectancy, here).

I love the fact that McArdle’s liberal interlocutors already seem to be back-pedaling from the suggestion that Obamacare will save lives. She writes, in part:

Apropos of my earlier post, Ezra Klein writes to complain that I have erroneously grouped him in with Nick Kristof. I should be clear that Kristof’s estimates on their own suggest that the death rate should drop by 20% or so over the next ten years; Ezra’s estimates are just gravy.
But this triggered a back and forth about what it means to claim that “hundreds of thousands” of people will be saved by this bill, and similar. A lot of my correspondents on the left seem to think that I am trying to set up some sort of a gotcha–to make this into a “contest”. Or that making predictions is just “sour grapes”.
That seems like a more apt description of people who just induced us to pass a bill that will ultimately cost more than $200 billion a year–the fifth or sixth largest line item in the US budget. During that debate I heard a lot about the 20-45,000 people who were dying from lack of insurance every year. I heard about how US mortality indicators lagged behind the rest of the developed world. I heard about infant mortality. I heard, over and over again, about medical bankruptcies, and how medical bills were bankrupting America. I heard about the CBO score that said this bill would be deficit neutral. Let me know if I’ve missed anything, but it seems to me that mortality, financial protection, and deficit-improvement were the three major planks upon which this bill was sold. They are certainly the bulk of the anecdotes that fill heart-rending articles and presidential speeches.
Forgive me, but to my admittedly naive ears, this sounds like what you are saying is that you think that if we cover the uninsured, we will have lower mortality rates, fewer medical bankruptcies, and a lower deficit.