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This is a debate on whether the US should adopt a national health care system, like the United
Mircea
Letting people die when it could be prevented IS about character, Mircea, and you have not responed to what I asked--which IS about a national health care system that could prevent needless deaths. Your do nothing attitude is what is allowing people to die.
Research released this week in the American Journal of Public Health estimates that 45,000 deaths per year in the United States are associated with the lack of health insurance. If a person is uninsured, "it means you're at mortal risk," said one of the authors, Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
The researchers examined government health surveys from more than 9,000 people aged 17 to 64, taken from 1986-1994, and then followed up through 2000. They determined that the uninsured have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those with private health insurance as a result of being unable to obtain necessary medical care.
Well, The Center for Disease Control estimates that a minimum of 45,000 people die each year due to lack of health care.
Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health. That figure is about two and a half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2002.
The study, conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.
Guess your able to dismiss HMS and FamiliesUSA as just liberal liars unlike the misguided, misinformed group you represent.
And, if you read Poppysead's previous post by a conservative Republican living in Canada, you can see the reality of universal healthcare changed her tune in just four years.
A 2009 Harvard Medical School study found, for example, that “the uninsured are more likely to die than are the privately insured.” “Lack of health insurance,” that study found, “is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths per year in the United States, more than those caused by kidney disease.” While, you, as Mitt of 2012, claimed that the government will protect those without insurance, the same study found that “alternative measures of access to medical care for the uninsured, such as community health centers, do not provide the protection of private health insurance.”
Another report, by the healthcare consumer advocacy group FamiliesUSA, found slightly lower numbers — 26,100 adults ages 25 to 64 died prematurely due to a lack of health insurance in 2010. The report, Dying For Coverage: The Deadly Consequences of Being Uninsured, also determined that more than 2,000 people die prematurely every month in the U.S. — 72 every day, three every hour. The report also found that from 2005 to 2010, “the number of people who died prematurely each year due to a lack of health coverage rose from 20,350 to 26,100.”
Now, on to the tough question: Is the 45,000 figure accurate? We can’t say for sure, but scores of other studies also conclude that persons without health insurance have a higher chance of dying prematurely than those with health insurance. A committee headed by Dr. John Z. Ayanian of the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine reviewed nearly 100 such studies released since 2002. And in March he summed up the findings for Congress this way:
Ayanian’s testimony to Congress, March 2009:Uninsured Americans frequently delay or forgo doctors’ visits, prescription medications, and other effective treatments, even when they have serious disease or life-threatening conditions. … Because uninsured adults seek health care less often than insured adults, they are often unaware of health problems such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or early-stage cancer. Uninsured adults are also much less likely to receive vaccinations, cancer screening services such as mammography and colonoscopy, and other effective preventive services.
Wake up and smell the DEAD roses---and sell your health insurance stocks, Mircea. Your attitude and refusal to look at anything else is killing people.
And here is why Repubs can't win the White House---this kind of idiocy so easily refutable with an online search:
In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio published Thursday, Mitt Romney repeated a claim that already got him in trouble once this cycle and has reflects an enduring belief among Republicans: that people in the U.S. don’t die because they lack health insurance.
“[Y]ou go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital,” Romney said. “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”
It’s eerily reminiscent of a statement President George W. Bush made in 2007 that haunted Republicans during the 2008 campaign — “[P]eople have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”
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.
The answer of conservatives to the data: "It didn't track how long those who were uninsured were without insurance."
Health insurance companies spend heavily to condemn something called “socialized medicine,” recognizing that any single-payer plan would likely result in heavy losses for their industry. But no major organizations or national political figures have advocated creating a system like Great Britain’s, where the government owns all the facilities and employs all the doctors and nurses.
Two other myths about universal care are that doctors oppose it and that quality of care would suffer.But a plurality of physicians, particularly primary-care doctors, supports national health insurance. And there is now strong evidence that, even in developed countries with addiction problems like ours, universal coverage correlates with improved quality of health across the socioeconomic spectrum.
'National Insurance' - as in the British version - is simply another tax. It doesn't go into any pool; it goes into the general tax fund.
If you live in Germany - where everybody is required to have medical insurance - then you will (probably) be insured under the State scheme (Die Kasse) and you will pay [AFAIR] 9.25% of your gross income into the fund. The monies paid into that fund are ring-fenced and are used to pay health charges. It is possible to opt-out (but you will have to prove you have adequate private insurance) and die Kasse is a pretty good option.
In the US, Hospitals and Ambulances are obliged to provide care to anyone needing emergency healthcare treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.(See The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) 42 U.S.C. § 1395dd)
In the US:
If you have health insurance with good coverage - no problem.
If you have medicare then (until all the money is taken out to pay for Obamacare) provided you can find healthcare providers people who are prepared to accept whatever medicare pays - no problem.
If you have medicaid, then - although the waiting times are likely to be very long - you will get treatment.
If you had a job which provided you with good health coverage, you or a family member is sick and you lose that coverage (perhaps because you lose the job) you're in a very bad place.
If you have a job which doesn't pay a huge amount, but you have health insurance; if you have a child with a chronic condition (I'll use type-1 diabetes as an example) and if your co-pay is high ($70 per month co-pay for test strips) then you are also very poorly placed.
You may well be tempted to save money on the test strips (you'll have plenty of other medical expenses) and you may well end up trying to prioritise expenditure, notwithstanding that you do have insurance.
No health care service can provide everything for everybody, but surely it is possible to provide a better safety-net for those who do try to act responsibly and it should be possible to make those who refuse to make any provision for their healthcare do so (through an insurance premium similar to that levied in Germany?)
'National Insurance' - as in the British version - is simply another tax. It doesn't go into any pool; it goes into the general tax fund.
If you live in Germany - where everybody is required to have medical insurance - then you will (probably) be insured under the State scheme (Die Kasse) and you will pay [AFAIR] 9.25% of your gross income into the fund. The monies paid into that fund are ring-fenced and are used to pay health charges. It is possible to opt-out (but you will have to prove you have adequate private insurance) and die Kasse is a pretty good option.
In the US, Hospitals and Ambulances are obliged to provide care to anyone needing emergency healthcare treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.(See The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) 42 U.S.C. § 1395dd)
In the US:
If you have health insurance with good coverage - no problem.
If you have medicare then (until all the money is taken out to pay for Obamacare) provided you can find healthcare providers people who are prepared to accept whatever medicare pays - no problem.
If you have medicaid, then - although the waiting times are likely to be very long - you will get treatment.
If you had a job which provided you with good health coverage, you or a family member is sick and you lose that coverage (perhaps because you lose the job) you're in a very bad place.
If you have a job which doesn't pay a huge amount, but you have health insurance; if you have a child with a chronic condition (I'll use type-1 diabetes as an example) and if your co-pay is high ($70 per month co-pay for test strips) then you are also very poorly placed.
You may well be tempted to save money on the test strips (you'll have plenty of other medical expenses) and you may well end up trying to prioritise expenditure, notwithstanding that you do have insurance.
No health care service can provide everything for everybody, but surely it is possible to provide a better safety-net for those who do try to act responsibly and it should be possible to make those who refuse to make any provision for their healthcare do so (through an insurance premium similar to that levied in Germany?)
The Swiss, too have an insurance system and their insurance costs are less than ours.
Taiwan is the last major country to adopt a health care system. They first looked at the U.S. and rejected it outright because it did not provide coverage for everyone. Ultimately the picked from among several European countries to come up with their own universal healthcare system. And the result:
Taiwan has the lowest administrative costs in the world at less than 2%. They only spend 6.3% of GDP on health care expenditures, and the average family premium is just $650 per year for a family of four.
Contributing to these lower costs is the advanced use of Smart card technology to increase administrative, billing, and provider efficiencies. Every insured Taiwanese has a Smart card with the patients’ history and medications, and which automatically bills the national insurance fund, which has resulted in expedited reimbursements.
Information stored on the Smart card includes: personal information, including the card serial number, date of issue and cardholder’s name, gender, date of birth, ID number, and picture; and NHI-related information, including cardholder status, remarks for catastrophic diseases, number of visits and admissions, use of NHI health prevention programs, cardholder’s premium records, accumulated medical expenditure records and amount of cost-sharing.
A universal system once again proves to be the least expensive and most efficient.
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another source on deaths of uninsured
