Health Reform is About Saving Lives

Between 2000-06, about 137,000 people died because they did not have adequate health insurance. For a country as rich as the United States, this is a grave scandal – and one made all the worse by the massive amounts of money devoted to the military. Ezra Klein does a quick and dirty calculation, estimating that at least 150,000 lives would be saved by this health insurance bill. At the very least.

He concludes:

“All this is intuitive. The uninsured are less likely to seek early care. They are less likely to get good care. They are less likely to return for follow-up care. They are less likely to be able to afford the maintenance of chronic conditions. At its most basic level, that’s what this is all about. That’s why people have been fighting for universal health care for almost a century now. That’s why this matters, and why the basics of the bill — subsidized access to health-care insurance — are so terribly important. This is life and, well, death. Lots of it, in fact.”