Fatal statistics
Editorial
Louisville Courier-Journal
September 22, 2009
Forty-five thousand a year.
That’s not a salary. That’s a statistic.
And behind every number in that statistic is the life of a human being that ended because the person was uninsured.
So says a new study issued by Harvard-based researchers associated with Physicians for a National Health Program, a 17,000- member network of doctors who support single-payer insurance in the United States.
The study says almost 45,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance, a number that outpaces annual rates of killers such as kidney disease. The reason: The uninsured lack preventive care and screenings and go longer without treatment.
The researchers analyzed data from national health surveys conducted by the federal government, which tracked 9,000 adults for eight years and followed up with them later. The researchers extrapolated those results with Census data and produced results that show that the uninsured have a 40 percent higher risk of premature death.
Given the tempo and tone of the raging health care debate, the results had barely been made public before critics began to slam it as flawed. Free-market reform groups such as the National Center for Policy Analysis attacked the study’s death risk as “significantly overstated.”
The PNHP numbers are higher than those of other studies, but other reports also have shown markedly increased risks for the uninsured. A 2002 study from the Institute of Medicine, for example, showed 18,000 people died every year from lack of health insurance. The American Cancer Society in 2007 said cancer patients without insurance were more than one-and-a-half times more likely to die within five years than those with insurance.
Twenty thousand? Forty-five thousand? Are Americans willing to settle for these numbers of dead, for lack of insurance, in the world’s wealthiest nation?
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20090922/OPINION01/909220313/Fatal-statistics