Statistics
Yeah, I know about that statistic. Here's an article on it.
Let's get past the hysterical headlines and emotional blurting and actually look at the numbers:
An Associated Press estimate — based on hospital cancer deaths in 2005 gathered by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality information and other data — suggests that at least 20,000 of the nation’s 560,000 annual cancer deaths are uninsured when they die. Experts said that estimate sounds reasonable.
20,000 people without insurance. That leaves 540,000 cancer patients who apparently DO have insurance under our current system (not that it did them much good). Do the percentages. I get about four percent.
Another figure:
Researchers then checked records for those patients for the five years following. They found those who were uninsured were 1.6 times more likely to die in five years than those with private insurance.
More specifically, 35 percent of uninsured patients had died at the end of five years, compared with 23 percent of privately insured patients.
So, we actually have a factor of 1.52 for uninsured deaths. Using this number, we can roughly work out how many of those 20,000 people who had no insurance would still have died with insurance. If they had all had insurance, only about 13,000 would have died.
This leaves 7,000 excess cancer deaths out of 560,000 due to lack of insurance. One percent.
I'm open to corrections on my math. Let me know.
Tell ya what: You come up with a government program that gives those few truly needy people any insurance that they can't get from the government already, and I'll sign on to it, and even pay my share of taxes for it. But leave the rest of us--the other 99 percent--the hell alone.
But then, for those pushing nationalized health care, this isn't really about helping that one percent, is it?
The chart in the article is a bit unnerving, too. Medicaid is a single-payer government health care system for the poor. This tell you anything?
