Friday, September 18, 2009

Nobody Will Remove The Filthy Profit Motive From Health Care. Meanwhile

"More than 44,000 Americans die every year – 122 every day – due to lack of health insurance."

Meet the Real Death Panels

"That’s the startling finding of a new study – Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults – that appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
The 44,000 dead a year estimate is about two-and-a-half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine in 2002.
The Harvard-based researchers 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.
“The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors and baseline health,” said lead author Dr. Andrew Wilper. “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes and heart disease – but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”
“Historically, every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of nonprofit national health insurance,” said study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs, and 45,000 pay with their lives.”
“Even the most liberal version of the House bill would leave 17 million people uninsured,” Woolhandler said. “The whittled down version that Senator Max Baucus is proposing would leave 25 million uninsured. That translates into about 25,000 deaths annually from lack of health insurance. Absent the $400 billion in savings you could get from a single payer system, universal coverage is unaffordable. Politicians in Washington are protecting insurance industry profits while sacrificing American lives.”

3 Comments:

Blogger Nina said...

i've come to the conclusion i have utterly zero faith in humanity anymore. in humanity getting it--waking up--realizing their imprisonment of the system. we can talk until we're blue in the face--by and large people want to remain asleep.

as was quoted in the matrix: "if one isn't awake (to the matrix) they are the enemy and cannot be trusted." sad but in a way, true.

18/9/09 10:04 PM  
Blogger nolocontendere said...

I resonate with your cynicism. This country is perilously close to complete collapse and civil war.

18/9/09 11:19 PM  
Anonymous constant gina said...

hmmm, no insurance is linked with a plethera of things...dont know what they will blame it on next....the alcohol?? lmao.

18/9/09 11:27 PM  

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