From article:
"That estimate was later updated by the Urban Institute, which reported that at least 22,000 adults died in 2006 due to a lack of health insurance."

Hey, that is the equivalent of more than SEVEN 9-11 attacks EVERY SINGLE YEAR in terms of death!

If these deaths were happening instead to anybody but mostly the poor and middle-class, this would have been a national outrage!

Death, death, and more death, due to the president's opposition to heath-care for all.

I guess he is just keepin' us safe...

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And I shoot from the hip, usually.

But this one is easy. No health care, no check-ups, no early warning for serious illness, no reprieve. We don't need any more poor folks. Go until you drop, and then stay down.

I recall Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed, in which she took a number of low-paying jobs, like working at Wal-Mart and being a Merry Maid, and tried to live exclusively on the wages she made. One of the things she saw was that the people working low-paying jobs tended to come to work sick, and with injuries. They couldn't afford to stay home. Even if there was a work-related injury, it often went unreported because the people couldn't afford to lose the job or the time. Health insurance isn't even in their vocabulary, and they keep body and soul together by luck, creativity, and sometimes working nearly around the clock.

One of the needs Martin Luther King addressed when he was here was the necessity, not for a minimum wage, but for a living wage for all Americans. There's another goal of his that we have not even tried to fulfill.

There are two posters in my library, inherited from the first and last refurbishing of the Catholic Worker in New York. One is the old Marx/Engels, "Workers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains!" and the other is a picture of Pierre Proudhon with his famous words, "Property is theft." on the bottom.

I'm musing now on whether the trucker's strike is just the beginning, and whether President Obama will see the first general strike in this country in seventy-five years. Or maybe the first non-regional general strike, ever.

Here's hoping it doesn't need to come to that before an ordinary, working person can afford health insurance for herself and her family. Improvement in the lot of the poor has always been done by revolution, not evolution, and as I look around, I don't seem to be living in an age more enlightened than any other.

Will we have to see everything torn down before each of us is willing to sacrifice a little so that the poorest of us can live a decent life? We know what Marx, Engels and Proudhon thought. I'm starting to side with them.

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And how many MORE people die or suffer serious injury every year, despite having health insurance, because their insurer refuses to pay for necessary procedures, charges unaffordable co-pays and deductibles, or arbitrarily restricts patients' access to specialists and/or expensive prescription drugs?

My employer-provided health insurance plan is probably as good as--or even better than--most. But the premiums DOUBLED this year, the copays for a doctor's visit went from $20 to $40, the copays for prescriptoin drugs went from $20 to $50, and the insurer simply refuses now to pay for certain drugs that are very expensive, so I am forced to pay for them out of pocket and ration my use of them. Two of my doctors have dropped out of my insurer's network because the reimbursement rates are too low--so I now have to pay nearly $200 out of pocket to see them. I am disabled and living on a small part-time income, and health care costs for me are approaching $750 a month out of pocket, which I can ill afford. And as I say, I'm one of the lucky ones, because I HAVE "good" health insurance, for which my employer pays a part of the premium.

Both Clinton and Obama have offered plans to extend coverage to more uninsured Americans, via the existing profit-driven system. That is surely a step in the right direction, but it does nothing to make health care more accessible and affordable for people who already have insurance. Only a single-payer, government-funded program of universal coverage (e.g., bringing everyone under Medicare) will accomplish that.

And plesae don't tell me that a government-run program of national health insurance will entangle everyone in a nightmare of bureaucracy and red tape. Bureaucracy and red tape are exactly what we have now, as anyone knows who has tried to appeal an adverse decision by a private health insurer or gain advance approval for surgical procedures.

Compared to the Byzantine network of private insurance plans in the US today, Medicare is the most efficient, cost-effective, and democratic health insurance program of all. It should be made universal.

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from voting again, EVER, 'cause these morons easily get swindled by the scam known as 'Reagonomics'.

Or else get ready for the Greatest Depression...

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Here is a comment I made on the above article; the truth is out there. We have population data that we could easily get to replace sample data collected in studies, and we are not smart enough to go get it.

As long as the discussion is centered on health insurance in place of health care, deception will trump education. What the Surgeon General could do with a database from a single payer boggles my mind. Not only cost data would be available but data on illness, treatments, location, human demographics, the list goes on an on. All we need is some data entry operators entering that information into a cray computer when they process payment. I can just hear all the idiots screaming “you are spying on me”. I have a news flash for you, your individual data is worthless, but normal distribution data is priceless. Beam me up Scottie I have seen enough of the lost world.

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I read an article down in Naples, FL about a network of doctors who are charging retainers to patients (about $400 a month) but you get total care. The doctors do housecalls and give full preventative care. The only downside is they can only take so many patients each. Now why can't more doctors do this?? Clearly the insurance companies are bloated bureaucracies, out of touch with their 'customers' needs. We don't need em.

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The same people who are insisting on "hard science" as a basis for making decisions are taking these statistics and making a big assumption re: cause and effect. Lack of health insurance is NOT the cause of death in many instances.

The truth, carefully ignored or squashed by the medical establishment, is that huge numbers of people die FROM medical treatment in this country. Does it also save many? Sure!

But the third-leading American-killing 'disease' should slap us awake: even using 'forgiving' (very conservative) figures, it's conventional medicine itself. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association Vol 284, Jul 26, 2000, following up on a report from the Institute of Medicine, confirmed this. Sources vary, but prescription drugs alone kill between 106,000 and 130,000 per year; hospital infections (which are kept under wraps) take around 90,000 lives, while total kills by medicine approach 230,000 to 250,000.

Worse, "The vast majority of drugs -- more than 90 percent -- only work in 30 percent or 50 percent of the people" - this from a large drug company executive.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a prime factor for why other industrialized nations outrank the U.S.(in health outcomes) is that they maintain a pluralistic approach to health-care delivery. This means many modalities and alternatives are allowed to thrive and openly compete in the medical marketplace, as distinct from the U.S., in which the government essentially supports a medical monopoly by a single modality - conventional medicine.

Maybe we shouldn't be in such a hurry to dump more money into a health care system before taking steps to reform it to be more effective, economical - and safe!

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I am a female medical professional who can't afford my boss' insurance plan and has been turned down by 3 different insurance companies for their insurance, merely because I've had "pre-existing" med conditions. I have gone off all my prescription meds, which were basically causing the need of the the others, and am doing ok. But, I am foregoing all doctor visits for screening and other health concerns due to lack of insurance.
The retainer idea's not bad. . .but $400/month? I was slated to pay $300/mo. had they offered me insurance through Blue Cross. It's ridiculous!
We need socialised medicine in this country so that we can become more civilised.
I'm sure I'll die because I can't afford to go to the doctor. . .I mean, really. . .I have other bills to pay, like rent, car, gas, utilities, food, credit cards, student loans!

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The question I pose is not whether any of the health insurance answers provided by the politicians or even the posters here or the experts are realistic answers to the question that needs answering: How do we as a society help care for those who are old, young, and ill? Many of the solutions offered are great, except...

I do not know if there is a perfect answer. I know that had I not had Medicare because I am disabled, I would have died in early February from viral pneumonia because I could not afford health care or the bills that would have come with the 6 day hospital stay and emergency room care I received. By the time I reached the hospital my heart was at 160 beats per minute and I was suffocating because my lungs were full of fluid. Even so, I had to pay $256 to finish off the $1,000 deductible for Medicare so that they would treat me, and my meds when I left the hospital were over $400 for just 30 days, and being disabled, I do not get prescription coverage on Medicare.

I like the idea of the $400 medical package described earlier, but perhaps local medical communities could set up a program similar to Community Supported Agriculture programs, and all citizens within the community could participate for a fixed rate each month, billed perhaps along with their property taxes or incorporated into their local sales tax rate. Everyone is then covered, with only minimal co-pays of from $10-$20 for office visits and $0 deductibles for everything else. If companies like Wal-Mart can offer $4 prescriptions or Sam's Club can offer 25% off on theirs, why can't local pharmacies be part of the coverage and offer meds at greatly reduced prices under such a program.

Insurance companies have become the greatest hindrance to medical care in this nation. They are so concerned with the bottom line, which they more often than not have ruined through poor investment choices rather than claims payments, that they have been responsible for the increase in the number of incompetent doctors that continue to practice, or the incompetent techs that make long distance medical decisions for which they are neither trained nor fully informed enough to make. (I suspect that these "doctor wannabes" are more responsible for deaths by medical malpractice than many doctors who end up accused since they seem to be the ones who are dictating to doctors how to treat, rather than accepting the doctor's decisions.) Many of these insurance doctors have made fortunes just working for insurance companies because they then get a locked in clientèle. The only decent medical care I have ever truly gotten was paid in cash, actually took the time to listen to me because he was not overloaded by insurance claimants, and treated me effectively.

I am disabled as the result of medical care not provided by my former employer's insurance company, and will be for the rest of my life. Sadly, had I actually gotten the kind of medical care I needed immediately, I could have been back to work within 6 months. Now I have a permanent health condition with a great deal of pain, and over $100,000 in student loans to retrain so that I can teach and consult on a schedule that my body can handle. I will finish my PhD in Public Policy in another year, I hope, but you can be sure that one of the areas as a consultant I will want to address with politicians is health care that works and if that means changing the way communities address the issue at a local level, since the Feds won't, so be it!

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I do not have health insurance and have come to grips with the fact that I might very well die prematurely because of this.

At the same time, I agree with the poster above that lots of time, the "medical care" you get is so damn bad it's a case of the "cure" being worse than the disease. This fact helps me feel ok about not being covered.

Damned if you do....damned if you don't. The entire medical system in the U.S. is pitiful and the country should be ashamed. And of course, there is no decent public debate, just a lot of screaming by the idiots on the boob tube.

Life sucks and then you DIE!

VideoProductionTips = Learn Internet Video

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How many were dopers, winos, or street people? Yes, an occasional good citizen falls thru the cracks but hard cases make bad laws.

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everybody would buy it that could afford it. The sad fact is that everybody dies whether or not they have healthcare insurance covering them. Healthcare insurance should be optional. That way the burden would be on the insurance industry to prove their value to customers. If people think they're getting a decent deal for their money, they'll buy it. Otherwise, they wouldn't be interested in buying it. There are too many other expensive things to spend money on for politicians to add another expense. (maybe if we were as financially well off as they are we could afford outrageous insurance policies)

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"The U.S. spends twice per capita what other industrialized nations spend on health care, but ranks 19th out of 19 countries on mortality amenable to medical care. There are wide variations in health care outlays across the U.S...OVER 100,000 LIVES COULD BE SAVED (yearly)....It is possible to slow the growth in health care spending and achieve better access to health care, improved quality, and health outcomes."

Karen Davis, President
March 12, 2008
Commonwealth Fund

(Based on a study published in Health Affairs that determined over 101,000 lives could be saved if our health system performed as well as those in other countries.)

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cover proven alternative therapies. If I had had the cash I could have kept her alive another year. I know a gentleman that limps with every step and is in pain chronically because of a broken leg. There was no money to have it set. At age 65 he will probably have it rebroken and reset under medicare. I know of one woman whose blood pressure is often 210 over 110 and cannot afford medication or insurance. If she purchased the school district's health insurance, there would be no take home pay. The insurance wouldn't pay for the medication anyway.

WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE.

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