Health Care Saves Lives, Lack of Coverage Contributes to Death

Among conservatives the view is that health care is so important that we don’t dare have the government give it to anyone because that might, through leaps of logic, lead to hypothetical future rationing. At the same time, even though health care’s important it’s rude to point out that America’s high uninsured rate kills people:

Lack of adequate health care may have contributed to the deaths of some 17,000 US children over the past two decades, according to a study released by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

The research, to be published Friday in the Journal of Public Health, was compiled from more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005.

The study concluded that children without health insurance are far more likely to succumb to their illnesses than those with medical coverage.

Sadly, the life-and-death stakes for uninsured people don’t seem to move the hearts of centrist senators nearly as much as the plaintive cries of insurance company executives. Thus we continue to hear that people not only oppose creating a public option, they oppose such an option so vehemently that they would filibuster are large and multi-faceted health care bill merely in order to kill it.