While Republicans plot to eliminate the Affordable Care Act and while some Democrats try to find ways to keep funding health insurance companies and preserving the high cost of prescription drugs, people are dying because they do not have health insurance.
Researchers have estimated that Americans without health insurance are 40 percent more likely to die than those with it. A Harvard study estimated that lack of health insurance in 2005 resulted in 45,000 deaths of Americans age 18-64.
Before the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care), some 43 million Americans did not have health insurance. The Affordable Care Act reduced that number, but there are still over 27 million people without insurance. Thus, the expected death toll is over 28,000 per year.
These data suggest that some of the current debate might be misstated. Through the years, the issue has often been whether health care is a right, but it could be stated more accurately as to whether there is a right to live.
It continually amazes me that we pay taxes and get children educated “free,” but we have to “pay (for medical care) to live.”
Unpaid medical bills are a leading cause of personal debt and bankruptcy. A recent Washington Post expose described how some of this happens.
The Post story pointed out that during the last six years, the University of Virginia Health System filed more than 36,000 lawsuits seeking to recover $106 million in unpaid bills. They seized wages and bank accounts and put liens on property and homes, forcing some families into bankruptcy.
The UVA Health System has been very persistent in going after payments, pursuing poor as well as middle-class patients for almost all they are worth. They may be one of the worse offenders, but they are not alone. Hospital systems in Oklahoma, New York, Tennessee, and Maryland have all been accused of being too aggressive in their debt collection efforts.
Patients tend to have financial problems because UVA, like many U.S. hospitals, charges patients at rates far higher than what insurance companies pay for their members. Such bills often have little connection to the cost of care, experts say. This results in the gorging of patients.
While the UVA System’s collection efforts might be unseemly, they are probably not illegal. They are just playing by–and perhaps exploiting–the rules they are given to play by.
Only in America. The United States is truly exceptional with medical care being such a for-profit system. Thousands of people either die because they cannot get medical treatment due to a lack of insurance. Or they go broke trying to pay for expensive medical care even when they have insurance. This does not happen in the rest of the industrialized world.
