275,000 Will Die Without Reform

The cost if President Obama and Congress don't get the job done on health care reform? 275,000 lives, according to a new report.

The research, by advocacy group Families USA, found that without reform, 275,000 American adults will die prematurely over the next ten years because they lack insurance.

The reasons are familiar -- lack of access to care outside the emergency room and skipping routine and preventative care due to cost -- but the numbers are stark. If nothing changes, there will be 34,600 projected deaths in California alone, 31,700 in Texas and 25,400 in Florida.

Already, 68 Americans are dying every day because they don't have health insurance, the group found. That number could jump to 84 by 2019.

The numbers cover adults aged 25 to 64, leaving out kids and seniors, who are already often covered by government programs.

When members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, grapple with the consequences of success or failure on health care, they seem to be thinking primarily in terms of politics: what it will mean for the November midterm elections, what it will mean for Obama's domestic agenda, etc. But that stuff should be small potatoes when compared to the non-political, very human consequences shown in this report and others like it.

"Failure to pass health care reform -- in effect, doing nothing to make health coverage and care affordable -- results in a huge and terrible cost," Families USA executive director Ron Pollack said in a statement. "We can measure that cost in many important terms, like escalating health care costs and unaffordable increases in premiums, but we should recognize the ultimate, inexcusable consequence -- lost lives."

Of course, we've been here before. President Clinton's effort to overhaul the health care system collapsed early in his first term, in a political implosion so severe that no one dared to take another crack at reform for the next 15 years. The result? More than 290,000 people have died too soon due to lack of insurance since 1995, the report found. Advocates are saying that if people in Congress won't get their hands dirty to pass a reform bill, they may soon have blood on them.

Photo credit: jimbowen0306