Yes, You Can Die From a Lack of Insurance

By on August 8, 2012 in GOPocrisy

American lives are at stake

SPOILER: You’re probably going to die in a hospital bed in your sixties, seventies or eighties. The culprit will probably not be terrorism, China or the government coming for your guns. It will be heart disease or cancer.

By and large, Americans die of disease. And too many of us die of diseases that are preventable. According to a Harvard Study, 45,000 of us die every year for lack of insurance. And this is as we spend more money per capita and get worse results than any industrialized country in the world.

This new Priorities USA ad finally makes the connections between a lack of financial stability, a lack of health insurance and death. Yes, death. People die because they lack health insurance and more will die if Romney wins and the Affordable Care Act is repealed. That point needs to be made.

This woman died because she lacked insurance. Like too many Americans, she waited till the last possible moment to seek care. And since we all pay for each other’s health care, we ending paying for a huge percentage of it during the last days when little can be done. Is this Mitt Romney’s fault? No. Does he want to take health care away from millions of Americans? Absolutely.

And Republicans are furious that someone is finally saying that Americans die because of our insane health care system and more will die if Romney wins. Conservatives are willing to use the threat of death by foreign interest to scare you into anything they want. But use the real life fear of what actually kills us and suddenly you’ve gone too far.

Now is the time to go too far, then. Because what the Republicans are planning means that we’ll pay more for health care and get less of it. And Americans will die. We can prevent that if we’re willing to say what’s at stake.

[CC image by mah_japan]


  • AtriathleteK

    Although I agree with the idea of basic healthcare for everyone, why am I on the hook for paying what is the end result of people’s smoking, drinking, and overeating habits? Where’s my tax deduction for going to the gym, eating fruits/vegetables and not smoking/drinking? I don’t think we should repeal the healthcare law, just throwing some ideas out there to think about.

    • Libertariana

      Being healthy won’t prevent you from being in a crippling accident, having a child with birth defect, getting most cancers, or many other things that would also be covered. Ultimately… why do we not care enough about our fellow citizens to stop quibbling over things like this? This is why the US is so fucked- people just don’t care about anything outside their own front doors anymore. This is why the government has to force us to contribute to the common good… because left to our own devices, most of us would leave anyone they didn’t personally know or care about to rot and not have a shred of guilt. Doesn’t make us sound very progressive, does it?

      • http://twitter.com/DarkCoyster Alex

        its not contributing to the common good thats the issue, its the fact the government expects only the middle and poor class to contribute while letting the rich get away with it because they claim a ‘dancing horse’ on their tax return

        • CMO

          While I do agree with you and I do agree that everyone should have access to medicine at little or no cost the major and underlying problem is that not everyone is required to pay taxes. Only about 52% of the country even pays an income tax, that is rich, middle class, and poor all together. A flat tax of 15% no matter what plus an added weighted percentage on individuals with income over one million would certainly be a step in the right direction.

      • Theresa Markham

        actually, healthy thoughtful diets paired with preventive care will actually stop most cancers. Insurance companies aren’t to fond of paying for preventive care though…

    • Andrew

      Actually, the sooner they die the cheaper they are. A majority of healthcare costs come during old age which interestingly enough is already mostly socialized via Medicare.

    • http://twitter.com/ChocChipsMusic The Chocolate Chips

      I don’t think that’s a completely unreasonable idea.

      I don’t think it should so much be a tax deduction for eating fruits & veggies – but perhaps it’s an issue of where do subsidies go? It shouldn’t be more expensive to eat healthy than it is to eat junk food.

      Maybe a tax deduction for going to the gym – but I’m not sure about that.

      On the other hand I certainly believe in the idea of sin taxes on things which cause health problems. Adding just a small tax on soda and the like can add up to huge #s and help pay for the health problems caused by those bad decisions.

    • http://twitter.com/swjaxon Stephen Jackson

      You do this already if you have health insurance. It’s not like the money you contribute goes into a little vault reserved exclusively for you. Your money is used for people who get sick, whether it’s the big fat smoker or the healthy marathon runner who gets colon cancer.

      • AtriathleteK

        Very good point. I think my frustration with the healthcare law comes from two things. 1) Why wasn’t the topic of medical malpractice lawsuits addressed to combat the sky-high insurance premiums doctors are forced to pay and thus passed onto patients? And 2) why are so many people unable to see the link between drinking a six pack of soda a day and the type II diabetes they are going to suffer from in 20 years? Mandatory health insurance is a band-aid whereas prevention is the real solution. Where’s the talk of improving school lunches, teaching kids nutrition early on, and taxing junk food a la cigarettes?

        • http://eclectablog.com Eclectablog

          You’re kidding, right? Haven’t you been following the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” initiative? She’s been a warrior for better nutrition and physical fitness. According the the freaks on the right, she’s trying to legislate how much broccoli you have to eat.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Valerie-Bobincheck/1714020397 Valerie Bobincheck

            as a counterpoint, the house wants to omit the support for fresh fruits and vegetables from the school lunches and substitute canned and dried…(canned in sugar syrup); our school already gets dried fruit leathers instead of the fresh fruit….and that was limited to pre pkgd apple slices.

  • http://twitter.com/YoungbloodJoe Joe Youngblood

    I have insurance and Gap coverage and Aflac. I also have intense back pain and major leg issues in my right leg. I’ve seen 7 doctors, chriros, pt’s and orthos over the past 8 months trying to figure it out. I’ve spent thousands, draining my medical savings to figure it out as the problem just got worse.

    Finally we figure out the problem and it’s nothing too serious, a bulging disc in my lower spine. Guess what. Insurance calls it elective, deductible is too high, gap coverage only works if it’s over $2k. So after a week of thinking I was about to be cured I get a call demanding a thousand bucks for my treatment. I don’t have that, they say ok and cancel my treatment. My issues go on.

    Healthcare isn’t just about not dying, it should be about living. Insurance does not equate to healthcare, it only equates to more rejections and more medical debt for the poor.

    • http://eclectablog.com Eclectablog

      Great comment. You are so right.

    • http://twitter.com/BizBragEngineer Hunter Sherman

      Not sure if this helps at all, but I had a very similar experience and have the same diagnosis. Luckily I saw an amazing surgeon that explained to me that my core could do the job my disc did if it was strong enough. After 2 months of solid ab and back workouts I’m pain free. I don’t know if this applies in your case (my messed up disc was towards the bottom of my spine) but I hope it helps!

  • josh_brandt

    I really appreciate your perspective, but in my experience, one of the things that is always missing from these conversations is the reality for the normal girl or guy who is just trying to deal with everyday life. For example, my brother just got laid off and doesn’t have time to think about lofty issues when he’s trying to bring bread to the table on a day-by-day basis. I’m sure you can understand this perspective, but it still often gets forgotten.
    I know it’s a little off-topic, but I also struggle personally with weight loss, as I know many others do. I’m not about to put some fake chemical in me that makes me lose weight, but I’m much more open to natural products like ginseng, niacin, garlic, and other things in nature that help to slowly help increase body metabolism. I saw this research report, for example, that was about a company trying to use a natural blueberry extract to help lose weight. I use their BluScience vitamins from GNC and they’ve been helping to speed up my metabolism without any side effects…
    redchip.com/files/redchipReports/CDXC_20120709_1Q12%20Update.pdf
    …I think all of these issues, though, need to include a human element in them. We need to not only talk intellectuall about these things, but also with a real human spirit, struggles, failures, even weight loss lol, whatever it is that is keeping us back and hindering our productiveness. Thanks, again, for your write-up here.

    • http://twitter.com/tweetingyouknow Sean Wendt

      People struggle with weight loss because they’re mislead and misdirected by the billion dollar pharmaceutical industry, and what a crime it is, because all you need are fruits and vegetables.

      Watch the movie Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. Go on a juicing fast, 3 days, 5 days, 10 days if you can. You will lose weight fast and be healthier than you’ve ever been.

  • Alex

    The world is overpopulated anyways. We can only hope that the majority of people will die in their 60′s, otherwise in a couple hundred years we will have exhausted everything this Earth has to give us.

    • simulacraa

      The birth rate is pretty steady in US, Europe, and other first world nations. Overpopulation is coming from developing nations like India and China. US can be sustainable with our current population if resources were used more efficiently.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jefe.el.jefe Geoff Kuhfeldt
  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=535783020 Rob Empire

    Can we SEE RECEIPTS for all the donations you’ve made to healthcare assistance charities? Or would you rather just spend someone else’s money?

  • http://www.facebook.com/derek.beauchemin.1 Derek Beauchemin

    Has anyone on this thread experienced National Health/Single Payer/Universal Health Care? I have and it bloody works. You can parse and debate all you want, but the simple truth is that the health care ‘industry’ in America is a meat processing plant and you’re the delivery system for the real product… money.

    • http://eclectablog.com Eclectablog

      Bingo. Nailed it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001448359974 Forest Miller

    She had insurance — that has been proven. So, if she didn’t die from a “lack of insurance,” what killed her? Lung cancer, right? Did she smoke? Why didn’t she see a doctor sooner? She had insurance. . .this whole thing doesn’t make sense.

    • jared

      Even with insurance, you can be on the hook for thousands of dollars, for very little.

      Even with insurance, it costs so much. We wait and wait, to put off having to pay.

  • teardrinker

    i have zero insurance. i have to pay out of pocket for dr visits and medications each month,over 200$. if the ta cuts for the wealthy were dropped it would almost pay for the entire healthcare program.the sad thing is states were given the oppertunity to opt out.leaves me and alot of others still bent over.

  • leftover

    Lack of health insurance doesn’t kill. Lack of insurance or lack of adequate insurance may contribute to mortality, but it doesn’t kill. Be sensible.

    Because if you’re sensible, you’ll realize that neither Romney’s health insurance schemes nor Obama’s health insurance schemes…which are remarkably similar…will do anything to improve the delivery of the kind of high quality life-saving healthcare necessary to save any of those 45,000 lives mentioned in that Harvard study. Ask Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of that study and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. She’ll tell you only a national Single Payer, improved Medicare-for-All healthcare program can accomplish that goal.
    Paying more and getting less isn’t just a Republican plan. It’s the Democrat plan now, too. They call it Obamacare.

    Single Payer. Everybody in. Nobody out.
    Fiscally responsible. Financially sustainable. Morally agreeable. Constitutionally sound. Pro-business.
    H.R. 676
    http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/february/summary-hr-676-the-expanded-improved-medicare-for-all-act

  • BARBBF

    45,000 Americans die…50,000 Libyans are dead because of Obama’s support of the illegal invasion of Libya. The ethnic cleansing (murder) of Black Libyans continues. 3,000 or more women, men and children in Pakistan, Yemen, Somali, Libya have been incinerated by US predatory drones. How many more will be murdered by the US support of rebels in Syria? We probably will never know. Will anyone care?

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