Real Death Panels

Jonathan Cohn calls it a “squeeze play” but whatever you call it there’s something bizarre about watching an American conservative movement whose general goal is to have the public sector provide as little as possible to anyone, and whose specific goal is to prevent public policy from extending health insurance to the tens of millions of currently un- or under-insured Americans, posing as the defenders of the right to access to generous health care services.

And of course the right-wing does want “people” to have access to generous health care services—rich people. Others will just have to, you know, get sick and die for the sake of free market principles. As Joe Conason says these are the real death panels:

When Republican politicians and right-wing talking heads bemoan the fictitious “death panels” that they claim would arise from health care reform, they are concealing a sinister reality from their followers. The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die—either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.

The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of working age due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least 20,000, according to studies conducted over the past decade by medical researchers, and is almost certainly rising as more and more people lose their coverage as costs continue to go up.

They die primarily because they didn’t have the coverage or the money to pay doctors and thus delayed seeking treatment until it was too late. They don’t get checkups, screenings and other preventive care. That is why uninsured adults are far more likely to be diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer or heart disease, at an advanced stage, which severely reduces their chances of survival.

There’s pretty good evidence that consumer driven health plans can save money without producing worse health outcomes (see also this and this) but it doesn’t work at all if what “cost-consciousness” compels people to do is skip out on preventive care or basic health screening. That just leads to people dying. And that’s what lack of adequate health coverage does in today’s United States.