Lack of universal health care is a mass killer
By Dr. Deb Richter, October 4, 2009
In my 20 years of practice as a family physician, I have encountered dozens of cases where the main contributing factor to a person’s death was the lack of health insurance for most of their lives.
The lack of universal health care is a mass killer in this country.
Nearly 45,000 deaths in the United States each year are attributable to the lack of health insurance, according to a Harvard University study released in September.
That astonishing figure, which appears in the American Journal of Public Health, is a big uptick from the Institute of Medicine’s finding seven years ago that 18,000 people die each year because they lack insurance and thus have less access to care.
The Harvard Medical School researchers found that an uninsured person’s risk of death is 40 percent higher than his or her privately insured counterpart. Looked at another way, every 12 minutes a person dies unnecessarily because he or she doesn’t have health coverage.
As startling as this 45,000 figure is, I fear it underestimates the problem.
In my 20 years of practice as a family physician, I have encountered dozens of cases where the main contributing factor to a person’s death was the lack of health insurance for most of their lives.
I recall one family that lost three members this way.
George was 21 when he died of complications of juvenile diabetes that he’d had since the age of 2. Whenever George worked for a while, he lost his Medicaid. This meant he could no longer afford to test his blood sugars, they would get out of control, he would get sick, have to stop working, he would spend down, then qualify for Medicaid again. This went on for the three years I knew him.
His older sister Tina also had juvenile diabetes from the age of 6. Her situation was the same — working, losing insurance, getting sicker, not working, getting Medicaid etc. Tina was pregnant at the time of George’s death. Her poorly controlled diabetes made her a very high risk for complications in pregnancy. The baby was born three months prematurely and died in the intensive care unit one month later. Tina’s health worsened after that and within one year she died in post-op after heart bypass surgery. She was 25.
Then there’s Russell — also a diabetic, also on and off insurance. He died at age 37 of diabetic kidney failure. He was uninsured for years.
Another case — Vivian — had warning signs for cancer for years. She finally qualified for insurance but died two weeks into the workup of a pulmonary embolus (a complication of pelvic cancers).
I am only one clinician, and yet I have witnessed dozens of cases of people who died of preventable illnesses — preventable illnesses that could have been treated had these patients possessed uninterrupted, seamless coverage for needed treatments over their lives.
Take my experiences and multiply them 700,000 times for the number of physicians in this country and you arrive at a lot more than 45,000 deaths a year due to lack of insurance.
It is time that our nation join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee seamless health care coverage to every man, woman and child in America.
In other words, it’s time to enact single-payer health care — Medicare for All.
Dr. Deb Richter practices family medicine in Montpelier, Vt., and is a past president of Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org). She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.
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Health care, a major element of our economic heartbeat is stressed! My Loose Penny Program, a capital injection, will start to repair our muscle, but mission critical diplomacy is required.
The president needs to bring our fast foods, supermarket; Target and Wal-Mart CEO’s to the Rose Garden, to ink the deal. Barack Obama went to Cairo and Copenhagen. He can meet with KFC. Our pocket change can make the critical health care diff rinse.
Every chain must participate in our Loose Pennies Program, regardless the size of their enterprise. Our purpose: an additional two-cents in their cash registers. For every item registered we want two pennies extra, tacked as patriotic gratuity.
This is not a government mandate. A patron can refuse to pay the voluntary two cents. Burger, fries and a drink total six extra cents, pennies off the pavement. Regardless what we purchase at the market; we are only pitching in some loose change out of pocket. 40 items at the supermarket could easily add up to $150. Does 80 cents inhibit your generosity?
A worker chosen by the workers to represent them can meet with the managers to approve the total pennies for everything out the door the week before, dividing that total by everyone’s hours worked.
Then we include up to $2 dollars extra for every hour in the worker’s paychecks. We could deduct 5 % for a medical mal-practice pool, but employers are exempted from matching, so sticker prices won’t be raised to cover any additional cost of doing business. Fast food chains and supermarkets won’t be harnessed by charges from our two-pennies program!
The worker’s pay raise doesn’t come out of management’s pocket, but work place production will increase. When someone quits, the crew might ask the boss leave them to pick up the slack, so they earn more money!
The overage, beyond $2 dollars hourly extra in every pay, goes to interest bearing medical savings accounts, with the worker's name on his or her portion. President Obama can ask everyone on the low end of the economic chain to divide their bounty, or he can order the take home half in cash, with the balance going to grow their medical savings accounts.
The medical savings account, as a health care solution beats health insurance! Insurance companies are dedicated to making money, not protecting the sick from financial disaster. When an insurance company cancels your policy because you have an expensive disease, they don’t refund your premium. But with a Health Assurance Savings Account, when you quit or get fired from the job, your medical savings account goes with you!
After a year behind the fast food counter, a 40-hour per week worker could have more than two grand in their Health Assurance account. Ten million uninsured people at the bottom of our economic food chain might not have health care insurance but all would carry Health Assurance. In the event they don’t feel right they have access to medical care, and a second opinion, because the money to pay is there! When it’s your money, wasteful procedures evaporate.
This works for the medical professional. You agree to the fee, the doctor swipes your card and the money is deducted from your Health Assurance account. The insurance company is out of the mix.
This proposed over-the-counter voluntary two-cent gratuity, $344 dollars monthly is transferred to the working not so rich by management, without bureaucracy. Government bureaus are out of the mix.
In all the dry cleaners add a nickel to every shirt pressed, a dime for every dry cleaned piece. In all the family operated dry cleaners, medical savings accounts will replace the worker’s share of their family’s health insurance.
This 2 cents extra covers 90% of all the minimum and lower wage jobs in USA, juicing the recovery by pumping the bottom of our economic chain, enriching the people most likely to purchase consumable goods with their money! Those in a low echelon hourly job, working 40 hours a week will have $80 extra weekly in his or her pay envelope, the diff rinse between a life scraping by and getting ahead; the advantage of $76 after a 5% set aside for a medical mal-practice pool, or $40 in their pay with minimum $36 earmarked for Health Assurance savings.
Seven million uninsured not so rich people building Medical Assurance Accounts will directly benefit from this voluntary deal. We gain from tipping our pennies to working folks, as these millions of uninsured won’t be crowding emergency clinics for care, which we all pay for. Emergency health care is infected by the actuarial projections of how many uninsured people might use an emergency room walk-in for care during the course of any year.
Working people in min-wage jobs with Health Assurance accounts cover their access on a need-to-be seen basis. In addition to medical savings accounts, the two cents gratis could save a million mortgages, a contribution to neighborhood health as deserted house disease devalues the whole street.
For the rest of our uncovered citizenry, doctors and dentists must be given the volunteer opportunity to do tax deductible charity work, treating them. A charity patient is anyone without insurance. The plan: doctors do $50,000 in charitable medical services and deduct the 50 large off the top of their federal tax. Then, after all the deductions, the doctors take an additional half off their bottom line; twenty-five thousand or half, whichever is greater.
The hallmark of Obama’s campaign for president was “change” beyond a changing of the guard.
Medical professionals could perform $100,000 in charity and deduct $50,000 off their tax and because they only owed $49,000 in taxes, earn a one thousand dollar income tax credit. This health care approach cost effectively makes sense.
Doctors won’t be at the mercy of an insurance companies,’ take it or leave payment. Those who cannot afford the premiums, with pre-assurance from their family physician, will cancel their outrageous insurance policies.
Every doctor will have a waiting list of patients waiting to be classified as charity. Doctors will have more patients, their work incentive, freedom of income tax.
Isn’t this one-line change in our tax code easier to digest than a thousand page med-reform vaccination, a stick-it-to-us hatched by a scam congress? Would the insurance company’s shills show up at town hall meetings screaming, “It’s a communist plot! Down with their two cents extra for medical savings accounts?”
Every doctor and dentist will have a sign on the door: “No insurance? I’m here.”
These ideas will enrich our economy from the bottom up, possibly save a million mortgages, and insure access to health care services for many, if not all the millions of uninsured people, whilst leaving the greedy insurance companies out.
But your on-the-take congress, salted with insurance money, won’t allow it.
The long-term solution to our health care prob limb is free medical education for doctors, dentists, and all related personal, our goal one hundred thousand doctors graduated every year until we have one family doctor for every thousand people. A national marijuana tax could fund this program. Politishinz are good at identifying issues, but those who finance their campaigns govern the solutions.
In that light, the above proposed change in our tax code, encouraging doctors and dentists to treat the uninsured as a deductible charity, could not pass either House of the current congress in a million years without a public outcry first.
I am the unknown poet, a long-time candidate for president, roasting in the sun.
Once upon a time our Fourth Estate was independent, standing watch, reporting true. Today’s corporate approach to politics locks out the unknowns who seek public office, a primary reason there aren’t any candidates. You announce, “I’m a candidate.” The editor’s don’t ask, “What are your ideas?” But, “Show us twenty million dollars.” And without access to buckets of ducats, the access to broadcast speech, to present their platforms is also blocked. Blog in the bog, dog.
We need to renew our politics, starting with the reestablishment of our First Amendment Right to televised political speech. Upon this essay, I requested e quill time of our television networks, to give my response to president Obama’s health care speech to the congress, which the networks played live.
I am preparing a Formal Complaint against all of them for ignoring my request. Then I am going to move against all of the TV networks in Federal Court.
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