Health Care Reform...as if I needed any more reasons!

Here are opening paragraphs describing the Harvard study obn death rates among uninsured Americans.

Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health. That figure is about two and a half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2002.

The study, conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, 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 Andrew Wilper, M.D., who currently teaches at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “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.”

This number is roughly equivalent to the number of people killed in automobile accidents in the U.S. each year. Over a ten year period, we are talking about almost 500,000 largely preventable deaths. This fact alone should be enough to demonstrate the failure of our current private enterprise based health care and insurance system.