Ezra Klein - The Dems are Trying to Keep Grandma Alive! And Uncle Bob Too!

[Clio the Leo]

(That's not the ACTUAL title of his essay, but it COULD be.)

The 150,000-life health-care plan



By now, you're probably used to hearing about the $900 billion health-care bill. But what about the 150,000-life health-care bill?

Oddly, that label hasn't made its way into the conversation. But it is, if anything, a conservative estimate. The Institute of Medicine developed a detailed methodology for projecting the lives lost due to lack of insurance. The original paper estimated that 18,000 lives were lost in 2000, and the Urban Institute updated that analysis with data for 2006, yielding an estimate of 22,000 lives. As for 150,000, well, that's almost certainly too low. That's just the 2006 number across 10 years, which is the time frame we generally use for health care, with a third of the lives saved lopped off, as we're not going to cover all of the uninsured. But since the population of the uninsured grows every year, and so does the death toll, it would surely be higher. So call it the 150,000-plus-life health-care plan.

We're very comfortable talking about the financial cost of health-care reform. We're less comfortable talking about the human benefits. But the fact that health insurance saves lives isn't controversial. A 2003 study examining cancer records from Kentucky found that uninsured women with breast cancer were 44 percent likelier to die than their insured counterparts. And that was after controlling for demographics, stage of diagnosis and initial treatment. A 2007 study found that the uninsured were 24 percent to 56 percent likelier to die of stroke, depending on the type. That study, too, controlled for all the relevant variables. Other studies have examined the issue more generally, using all manner of data sets and controlling all manner of variables. The Urban Institute's report summarizes a number of the papers.

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

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/the_150000_life_health-care_pl.html

Ok, now ..... email this to everyone you know!

[FrenchieCat]

1. Will do!