Suppose a licensed practicing physician said “We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction …(regarding a lack of health insurance) than drunk driving and homicide combined,” Should his remark have any credibility? If you are one of the more rational people in America and answered yes, then you should know that Dr. David Himmelstein, and Dr. Steffi Woodlander, who is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard conclude.
Incredibly, President Barack Obama’s health care plan has been fiercely opposed by people who we refer to as conservative republicans but who in reality are people taking money to oppose health care from some care providers and the insurance companies. As a side note to this plan, I have had some difficulty determining why some health care providers would oppose the made Obama’s plan because of the Hippocratic Oath. But of course I have no difficulty determining why the insurance companies are intensely against the public option. I once read about the Sherman Anti-trust Act. So I thank God for Physicians for a National Health Program, which supports the public option.
The Harvard research group said American adults younger than 65 years old without health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who with insurance. This awful number is sharply up from a similar study in 1993 that found uninsured people in the same age group had a 25 percent greater risk of death. In 2008, more than 46 million people in the United States have no health care insurance. This number probably does not include the 12 to 15 million illegal aliens. Nevertheless, the 46 million is up 600,000 from the previous year…before the economic crash!
Some of the worst states for uninsured are notoriously conservative Republican. Among them are: Florida at 26%, Louisiana at 25.5%, and of course Texas which comes in at 29.7%. I do not know what the hospital be availability is or emergency room capacity in areas where the highest uninsured live. But there is a general decline in public hospitals and clinics especially in New Orleans, which is in Louisiana, the third highest uninsured state after Texas.
The National Center for Policy Analysis, euphemistically referred to as a ‘Washington think tank,’ that advocates that health care should be a free-market, said researchers overstated the death risk and did not track how long subjects were uninsured. This answer should be justification enough for there to be a public option. Do you think this answer addresses the reality of not being insured even if is for three months.
Did any Congressional staff review the Harvard study involving nearly 9,000 patients tracked by the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) National Health Statistics through the year 2000 which excluded Americans over 64 years of age because of the Medicare health care coverage? Harvard professor of medicine Dr. Steffi Woodlander, flatly stated “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.”
COMMENT: In order to prevent President Obama from getting his health care through, conservative Republicans like John Boehner, Michelle Bachman, Joseph Lieberman, Dick Armey (Freedom Works) and of course Sarah Palin are willing to continue to grow the numbers of those who die from a lack of insurance in order to defeat Obama. Now they sure seem like a ‘death panel’ to me! Do you agree?
