Uninsured to Death

The data isn’t available yet for Illinois, but Family USA is looking at the lethal effect of lack of medical insurance on a state-by-state basis and the results are terrible a exemplified in Ohio:

Families USA researchers are doing a state by state analysis of people 25 to 64 to highlight the effects of what they see as a disjointed and broken U.S. health system.
"For this group of people, lack of health insurance is the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer," Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA said…
Families USA took their lead from a 2002 Institute of Medicine study that found a link between avoidable health-related deaths and lack of health insurance, finding that uninsured adults were 25 percent more likely to die early than adults with private health insurance. They estimated that 18,000 adults nationwide died in 2000 because they did not have health insurance.
A more recent study found that uninsured people 55 to 64 are even more likely to die early.

We, as a humane society, can not continue to ignore the plight of uninsured and underinsured people in our country. We must support the frayed safety net of care provision we have now and work to a more universal and permanent solution, whether that is universal healthcare in some form or a solid amalgam of private and public efforts at providing access to healthcare.

I have talked about this before and likely will again as close to this topic as I have been for a number of years.