Lack of insurance takes toll
15 04 08 - 11:46
Yet another estimate makes point that lives depend on health plans
In far too many cases in modern America, people don't die of what they have. They die of what they don't have.
What they have is diabetes, heart disease, emphysema, cancer. And, when they breathe their last, that's what someone will write on the death certificate.
What they don't have is health insurance. And, when they expire, they and their grieved and aggrieved loved ones will know that that absence is likely what did them in.
New numbers from Families USA, an organization devoted to the cause of getting all Americans on the health insurance rolls in one way or another, back up earlier reports from other public interest groups. People aren't just inconvenienced or even impoverished by a lack of affordable and sufficient health insurance. They die. Every day.
Following on similarly distressing reports from the Institute of Medicine in 2002 and the Urban Institute in 2006, Families USA calculates that, in 2006, 22,000 working-age Americans died - died - because they didn't have health insurance and thus could not receive services from the nation's huge - and hugely expensive - health care industry.
That same year in New York alone, the estimate goes, 1,300 people in that age cohort died due to treatable problems that went untreated. That works out to 25 a week. And, looking back to 2000, the number of uninsured people who died totals nearly 9,900 in New York alone.
These numbers are estimates, of course, and it is in the interest of interest groups of the mind of Families USA to push them to the high side in order to make their point: Being uninsured in America can be deadly.
Maybe the numbers are inflated. And they leave undone the important cost-benefit analysis of how much it would cost to buy all those people health insurance or to, when possible, force them to buy their own. But they do serve to put the lie to the widespread myth, expressed not long ago by no less a personage than the president of the United States, that health care is universally available in America because all anyone has to do is walk into a hospital emergency room.
Clearly, the president hasn't been in an ER - or even watched "ER" - recently. Emergency rooms in American hospitals aren't there to provide health care. They provide trauma care, sometimes the best on the planet. If you've been shot, broken your leg, been crushed in a car wreck or have gone into a diabetic coma, they are just the ticket.
But for day-to-day health care, the kind that detects, treats, manages and prolongs the life of people with diseases that don't explode but come up on you slowly, you don't need an emergency room, until the emergency at the very end of that disease. And, just by the way, the busy emergency room really doesn't need you, either.
You need a clinic, a family doctor and health insurance. People who have none of these don't get taken care of. Some are turned away. Some are too proud to take charity or too afraid of running up huge bills that they know they, and their families, can never pay.
Those who argue that universal health care is too expensive, or too socialistic or just plain unworkable may have some points. The belief that no one is suffering because of lack of health insurance is not one of them.