Elliot Denniston, guest columnist: Health insurance and your survival

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November 14, 2009

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Sat Nov 14, 2009, 07:57 AM CST

A recently published study shows how very dangerous it is not to have health insurance. Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance have just published research showing that 45,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have the insurance (published online by the American Journal of Public Health).

The study covered only working age Americans (that is, those not yet 65 and thus not eligible for Medicare). It found that they have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts.

So, lack of health insurance causes more deaths than kidney disease, and more than drunken driving and homicide combined.

The study “assessed death rates after taking into account education, income, and many other factors, including smoking, drinking and obesity” (HarvardScience.harvard.edu). In other words, we can’t dismiss the study by suggesting that low-income people have unhealthy life styles; those factors were statistically eliminated from the study’s conclusions.

The study used a methodology similar to one used in 2002 when the Institute of Health determined that about 18,000 people died every year because they lacked insurance; that meant that people then had a 25 percent greater risk of death without insurance than with it. The huge increase in deaths from the 2002 study to the 2009 study is due partly to an increase in the number of uninsured.

Altogether this means that the danger of being without insurance is far greater today than just seven years ago.

Steffie Woolhandler, a co-author of the study, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and a primary care physician, stated that “every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of nonprofit national health insurance. Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs, and 45,000 pay with their lives.”

Now put this study beside another one connecting medical problems to bankruptcies. In 2007, medical problems contributed to 62 percent of all bankruptcies, and that was a 50 percent increase from 2001. Worse still, that was before the current recession, which has deepened this crisis considerably.

Dr. David Himmelstein, lead author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, stated, “Our findings are frightening. Unless you’re Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy. Private health insurance is a defective product, akin to an umbrella that melts in the rain.”

Dr. Deborah Thorne, associate professor of sociology at Ohio University and study co-author, stated, “Families who file medical bankruptcies are overwhelmingly hard-working, middle-class families who have played by the rules of our economic system, and they deserve nothing less than affordable health care.”

These studies are two more wake-up calls about the nation’s health care system. Let’s hope that our feeble Congress will summon the will power to save us from these nightmares.

Elliott Denniston is a retired Missouri Southern State University professor. He lives in rural Webb City.

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Elliot Denniston, guest columnist: Health insurance and your survival

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