Will People Really Die Without Health Care?

The derision has begun in earnest.

Those who favor the recently-passed legislation to terminate the "job-killing" Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (their language, not mine) are laughing --ROFL? -- over assertions that people will actually die if the law is overturned.

Of course, it seems pretty ironic to me that the supposed reason for terminating the law is about jobs and NOT about the kind of health care that Americans deserve. (See previous post for what is a "right" vs. what is "right.") I agree that the PPACA is NOT the ultimate legislation that we need...it has all sorts of holes in it and can and should be vastly improved.

But does that mean that the first step should be to completely terminate it in order to save jobs? (Which is still a debatable conclusion, in my estimation.)

I came across an article in the American Journal of Public Health  -- written in 2009 and based on studies by the Harvard Medical School, the Cambridge Health Alliance, and the Centers for Disease Control dating back to 1984-- that puts the whole idea of people losing their lives over an act of Congress into some perspective. (Read it here)

The study "assessed death rates after taking into account education, income, and many other factors, including smoking, drinking, and obesity...As expected, death rates were... higher for males, current or former smokers, people who said that their health was fair or poor, and those who examining physicians said were in fair or poor health."

Additionally, "uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts..... Another factor contributing to the widening gap in the risk of death between those who have insurance and those who do not is the improved quality of care for those who can get it.... It estimated that lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually."


“The Institute of Medicine, using older studies, estimated that one American dies every 30 minutes from lack of health insurance,” remarked David Himmelstein, study co-author, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a primary care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance. “Even this grim figure is an underestimate — now one dies every 12 minutes.”


I suppose what I really want to ask the congresspersons in charge of this latest effort at saving jobs is this: "How many jobs does it take to justify the loss of 1 American every 12 minutes?" 

Couldn't we at least slow down the job/cost rhetoric for a while, continue to extend coverage to those who need it and can't get it, and THEN find a way to deal with the more egregious elements of PPACA?

How much is health care costing us...really?