Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Does Health Insurance Really Keep Us Alive?

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It seems every Democrat, Republican and special interest let alone the media have been throwing around reasons why the American health care industry is broken. So many lies have flooded the media and airways that no one could possibly know the truth.

Yet the President wants to force all Americans to have health care. Right now about 258 million Americans are insured and 46.3 million are uninsured. That means about 15% of all Americans are not insured. Health studies indicate that 45,000 die each year because they have no health insurance thus did not receive treatment.



What about those insured? According to The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) patients in hospitals under health care insurance who were victims of medical malpractice has now reached 225,000 deaths per year, and that does not even count those who died before they reached a hospital.



Here are the JAMA findings.

106,000 patients die each year from the negative effects of medication
80,000 patients die each year due to complications from infections incurred in hospitals
20,000 deaths per year occur from other hospital errors
12,000 people die every year as a result of unnecessary surgery
7,000 medical malpractice deaths per year are attributed to medication errors in hospitals

This totals up to 225,000 deaths each year, due to medical negligence of some nature. And that number is ever growing.



That means at a minimum five times as many people who have insurance die from medical negligence than the total who die from lack of health insurance (225,000 versus 45,000).

But that only tells part of the story. Even if you have health insurance and are getting treatment this is the number of people who will still die every year in America from health problems.



Heart disease: 631,636
Cancer: 559,888
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
Diabetes: 72,449
Alzheimer's disease: 72,432
Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
Septicemia: 34,234

Then there are deaths attributed to vaccinations that are required by the government. While the FDA lists about 11,000 SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) deaths annually, the FDA acknowledges the vast majority of such deaths go unreported. Studies in New York alone indicated 97% of SIDS deaths were not reported by doctors and hospitals, meaning the real SIDS death rate, attributed to adverse reaction to the vaccine, are really over 100,000 per year. Some vaccines kill up to 100 times more people than the deaths from the disease they are treating.



In spite of the fact Japan and England have both changed the vaccine programs moving the start date from 2 months, like we have in America, to 2 years, that resulted in a significant decrease in SIDS deaths, we in America have ignored the results.

I could go on and on with the deaths relating to chemo treatment from cancer to deaths from the flu vaccine. What is clear is that having health insurance is no guarantee you will survive the treatment and the staggering number of deaths from malpractice and unnecessary vaccines make we wonder if the whole nation should be on health insurance.



The Obama health reform bill may very well put 46.3 million people at risk if the health care industry that does treat the insured isn't fixed first. It seems as if our priority should be fixing the problems before we throw over 46 million more people to the mercy of a flawed health care industry.

When making all those promises people should remember that there are about 250,000 unnecessary deaths every year because people have health care insurance, not because they don't have insurance. And nearly 2 million more people being treated under health insurance die from the disease. Do you really think the health problems are being solved by Congress?

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