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filtherton · 03-28-2010, 12:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by scout

If you don't have insurance and you have medical problems beyond your means to pay there was always Medicare/Medicaid you could fall back on after you had expended your available cash. I've never personally known anyone to die from a preventable disease and I seriously doubt you have either. It isn't all that common and if someone has died from a preventable disease it's probably because they made a bad decision so please don't exaggerate it like people are dropping like flies because they can't afford insurance.

Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance | Reuters

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"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.

The findings come amid a fierce debate over Democrats' efforts to reform the nation's $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry by expanding coverage and reducing healthcare costs.

President Barack Obama's has made the overhaul a top domestic policy priority, but his plan has been besieged by critics and slowed by intense political battles in Congress, with the insurance and healthcare industries fighting some parts of the plan.

The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance.

An similar study in 1993 found those without insurance had a 25 percent greater risk of death, according to the Harvard group. The Institute of Medicine later used that data in its 2002 estimate showing about 18,000 people a year died because they lacked coverage.

Part of the increased risk now is due to the growing ranks of the uninsured, Himmelstein said. Roughly 46.3 million people in the United States lacked coverage in 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last week, up from 45.7 million in 2007.

Another factor is that there are fewer places for the uninsured to get good care. Public hospitals and clinics are shuttering or scaling back across the country in cities like New Orleans, Detroit and others, he said.

Study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said the findings show that without proper care, uninsured people are more likely to die from complications associated with preventable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

Some critics called the study flawed.

The National Center for Policy Analysis, a Washington think tank that backs a free-market approach to health care, said researchers overstated the death risk and did not track how long subjects were uninsured.

Woolhandler said that while Physicians for a National Health Program supports government-backed coverage, the Harvard study's six researchers closely followed the methodology used in the 1993 study conducted by researchers in the federal government as well as the University of Rochester in New York.

The Harvard researchers analyzed data on about 9,000 patients tracked by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics through the year 2000. They excluded older Americans because those aged 65 or older are covered by the U.S. Medicare insurance program.

"For any doctor ... it's completely a no-brainer that people who can't get health care are going to die more from the kinds of things that health care is supposed to prevent," said Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

'nuff said.

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I don't understand how you folks can be so thrilled to have hooked and crooked and gotten this bill passed. It does nothing for the middle class but raise rates in the short term and undoubtedly our taxes in the long run. It does absolutely nothing to help bring down costs. Essentially it will raise everyone's insurance rates and do nothing to reduce the actual high rates being charged by doctors and the hospitals. Making everyone purchase insurance without offering a public option is beyond asinine.

Predictions of doom aside, what it will actually do remains to be seen. I don't know anyone who thinks it's a perfect bill, bit I do know that a lot of people, myself included, think it's a good start.