5 Reasons To Support Health Insurance Reform
(#1) 450K Doctors Support Health Care Reform.
I’ve seen a lot of interviews with doctors who complain about the problems associated with trying to get the private health insurance companies to cover the care that their patients need. Overwhelmingly doctors favor health care reform (in fact many seem to favor a “single payer” system over the “public option.”) Who do you think we should listen to? The doctors that want to make us well or the insurance companies that just want our money?
(#2) Over 10,000 US Citizens Die Due To Lack Of Health Care Coverage Every Year.
This is a moral issue. If you are working against health care reform then you are working for the deaths of thousands of Americans. Really there’s no polite way to say this. It simply makes no sense to me that any American with even half a heart can be OK with the concept of their fellow Americans dying because they are not rich enough to afford health care coverage.
(#3) To Stop Discrimination Against The Sick People & Pregnant Women.
And it’s also the civil rights issue of our times. Right now the sick and the preganant are descriminated against by health insurance companies who won’t cover them due to “pre-existing conditions.” These are the people who need coverage the most and our system fails them.
(#4) To Keep Growing Costs Under Control.
With the current system America spends more money on health care than any other nation in the world but with inferior results to show for it. It’s clear that the US needs to do something to keep costs under control, that’s a big part of what health insurance reform will do. Those people who say health care reform will be too expensive are talking nonsense. What would be too expensive is not having health care reform.
(#5) The US Ranks #37 In The World In Health Care
For a country with the massive wealth of the US it’s absolutely embarrassing that our health care system ranks so lowly and that so many of our people die due to lack of basic health care coverage. It’s obvious that what we are doing now is not working. Read these seven truths about the US health care system to get a better understanding of how screwed up what we have now is.
I heard that Health reform, if passed, will not be implemented till 2012. Is this true?
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Comment by sharon @ health insurance — September 25, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
I spent a number of years in Japan, and got to have free annual health checks- as does the entire population. This disease prevention stance maybe why Japan has the longest lifespan of any country.
.-= sharon @ health insurance´s last blog ..Gum Disease is Scary Sometimes… =-.
Comment by sharon @ health insurance — September 25, 2009 @ 5:43 pm
our Health is very important that is why we should take care of it.
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Comment by mike@cheap auto insurance — September 28, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
Its hard to support this reform, even thought it is solving some problems. How many more is it creating?
Comment by Tim@Health care jobs — October 15, 2009 @ 1:45 pm
Thank you, this is a great list for me.
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Comment by Sarah@Best Acai Berry Product — October 18, 2009 @ 12:54 pm
The bogus death statistic that won’t die
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009
Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida has found his calling: Death demagogue. First, he accused Republicans of wanting sick patients to “DIE QUICKLY.” Next, he likened health insurance problems to a “Holocaust in America.” Now, he’s unveiled a new website entitled “namesofthedead.com” in memory of the “more than 44,000 Americans [who] die simply because they have no health insurance.”
Just one problem: The statistic is a phantom number. Grayson’s memorial, like the Democrats’ government health care takeover plan itself, is full of vapor. It comes from a study published last December in the American Journal of Public Health. But the science is infused with left-wing politics.
Two of the co-authors, Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, are avowed government-run health care activists. Himmelstein co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, which bills itself as the “the only national physician organization in the United States dedicated exclusively to implementing a single-payer national health program.” Woolhandler is a co-founder and served as secretary of the group.
Sounding more like a MoveOn.org organizer than a disinterested scientist, Dr. Woolhandler assailed the current health reform legislation in Congress for not going far enough: “Politicians are protecting insurance industry profits by sacrificing American lives.”
So, how did these political doctors come up with the 44,000 figure? They used data from a health survey conducted between 1988 and 1994. The questionnaires asked a sample of 9,000 participants if they were insured and how they rated their own health. The federal Centers for Disease Control tracked the deaths of people in the sample group through the year 2000. Drs. Himmelstein, Woolhandler, and company then crunched the numbers and attributed deaths to lack of health insurance for all the participants who initially self-reported that they had no insurance and then died for any reason over the 12-year tracking period.
At no time did the original researchers or the single-payer activists who piggy-backed off their data ever verify whether the supposed casualties of America’s callous health care system had insurance or not. In fact, here is what the report actually says:
“Our study has several limitations,” the authors concede. The survey data they used “assessed health insurance at a single point in time and did not validate self-reported insurance status. We were unable to measure the effect of gaining or losing coverage after the interview.” Himmelstein et al. simply assumed that point-in-time uninsurance translates into perpetual uninsurance – and that any health calamities that result can and must be blamed on being uninsured.
Another caveat you won’t see on Rep. Grayson’s memorial to the dubious dead: The single-payer advocate-authors also conceded in their study limitations section that “earlier population-based surveys that did validate insurance status found that between 7% and 11% of those initially recorded as being uninsured were misclassified. If present, such misclassification might dilute the true effect of uninsurance in our sample.”
To boil it all down in plain English: The single-payer scientists had no way of assessing whether the survey participants received insurance coverage between the time they answered the questionnaires and the time they died. They had no way of assessing whether the deaths could have been averted with health insurance coverage. A significant portion of those classified as “uninsured” may not have even been uninsured, based on past studies that actually did verify insurance status. But the Himmelstein team just took the rate of uninsurance from the original study (3.3 percent), applied it to census data, and voila: more than 44,000 Americans are dying from lack of insurance.
Next, the political doctors cooked up scary-specific death tolls for all 50 states (California – 5,302 Texas – 4,675!) Newspapers dutifully cited the fear-mongering factoids. The single-payer lobbying group co-founded by Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler took it from there. Last month, the group set up its own memorial on the National Mall for the phantom 44,000 casualties of uninsurance.
Dr. Himmelstein (who was also the driving force behind another flawed study tying medical debt to personal bankruptcies) eschewed scientific nuance and caveats to take to the airwaves and declare starkly that an American “dies every 12 minutes” because of lack of insurance. And now, Democrat Rep. Grayson has taken the monumentally dishonest concept online to solicit sob stories and put flesh on the weak bones of these dubious death numbers.
Where’s the White House health care “reality check” squad when you need it
This is an answer to your #2 gov’t propaganda that you have shown above. The other 4 are also misconstrued data and fabricated lies. I will show you truer answers in days to come.
Comment by paul roth — October 23, 2009 @ 3:56 pm
The average person who favors government intervention believes that the reform needed is with Health Insurance. Be careful not to confuse Health Care Reform with Health Insurance Reform. The two issues should be completely different, but it seems the Obama Administration has focused their energies in solving the Health Care Issue by focusing on Health Insurance.
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Comment by Ron@ Online Computer Science Degree — November 25, 2009 @ 11:54 am
The current state of the health system in general needs a big review in my opinion. Im in my 40′s and in not too many years will be needing to use the system which currently wouldnt support my needs…
Comment by Heather @ H Miracle — December 3, 2009 @ 10:01 am