45,000 Die Each Year From A Lack Of Health Insurance - The Fierce Urgency Of Now

The Harvard Medical School released a study yesterday that I dare you to read without your heart breaking.

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.

This is well up from a 2002 estimate showing 18,000 preventable deaths per year from a lack of health insurance. And the increase is directly related to the increase of the uninsured, as well as the scaling back of public hospitals or free clinics or access to care, particularly for those in poor areas. Diabetes and heart disease are two of the most common preventable diseases among this class of the uninsured. As one of the professors in the study puts it, "it's completely a no-brainer that people who can't get health care are going to die more from the kinds of things that health care is supposed to prevent,"

If anything, we're going to see this get worse, if nothing changes. Jobless rates are expected to remain high for years, according to the OECD. With the rapid job loss in this Great Recession, nobody expects as rapid a return. And that means more people dropping off the health insurance rolls. In addition, employers will raise costs and lower coverage, if they even keep it. And for every new member of the ranks of the uninsured, the chances increase exponentially for a preventable death.

The need for fundamental health care reform isn't just a statistical issue, or about budgets, or bending cost curves. It's a matter of life and death.

Both Overreacting And Underreacting

While the WHO raised their pandemic alert to Level 5, the second-highest level, they also significantly lowered the confirmed number of deaths in Mexico from the H1N1 (swine flu) virus.

30 April 2009 -- The situation continues to evolve rapidly. As of 17:00 GMT, 30 April 2009, 11 countries have officially reported 257 cases of influenza A (H1N1) infection.

The United States Government has reported 109 laboratory confirmed human cases, including one death. Mexico has reported 97 confirmed human cases of infection, including seven deaths.

The following countries have reported laboratory confirmed cases with no deaths - Austria (1), Canada (19), Germany (3), Israel (2), Netherlands (1), New Zealand (3), Spain (13), Switzerland (1) and the United Kingdom (8).

Further information on the situation will be available on the WHO website on a regular basis.

In that context, Joe Biden's comments about not allowing his own children to fly on planes or ride on subways seem hyperbolic. But Ezra Klein makes a compelling case that we SHOULD overreact to this possible pandemic.

It's true that the flu is, as of now, not especially deadly. Survival rates are quite high. That's a very good thing. And there's some evidence that this flu will prove mild. Possibly even more mild than a bad flu season. But it's not the end of the story. Influenzas mutate. The question is whether it mutates out of existence or towards lethality. "Towards lethality" becomes more likely if more people catch the flu and thus more mutations emerge. So being aggressive in stopping the spread of the largely non-lethal variant is important if we want to avert the development of a more lethal strain. It's not about stopping this flu. It's about stopping what this flu can become.

But if the flu isn't currently very lethal, it does appear to be extremely infectious. The reason is simple enough: It's a new strain of flu that human beings don't have resistance against. Not only can it spread very quickly, it is spreading very quickly. We've hit five on the World Health Organization's flu threat level. It only goes up to six. Six denotes a pandemic: The flu has spread to two or more WHO regions. And most experts expect we'll be there in days.

It's true that people shouldn't panic in the sense of stockpiling ammunition and duct taping windows. But this is a situation in which a short-term overreaction might be the best strategy. That would mean that people really curtail the sort of activities that abet the spread of infection: They cancel non-essential travel, bike rather than take the subway, wash their hands obsessively, etc. It's not crazy stuff. And unlike in financial crises or recessions, where cutting spending worsens the downturn, the sensible actions for fearful individuals will actually improve the probable outcomes.

I think the media has a responsibility to deliver realistic information, not conservative scaremongering that over-hype the threat and unjustifiably blame illegal immigrants and not what appears to be the central cause, factory farms. And I think there is a responsibility to keep this virus in perspective. At the same time, Klein's warning seems eminently reasonable. We don't have enough information to blow this off completely.

Secret Health Data News Dump Of The Week

John McCain wants to pretend he's being forthright about his medical condition, while dumping the data on the Friday before Memorial Day and controlling who gets to see them. That's straight talk.

Senator John McCain is set to release 400 pages of medical records, including documents related to his melanoma surgery in August 2000, to a tightly controlled group of reporters on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend [...]

On Friday, the campaign will allow a small pool of reporters access to the records from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific time in a conference room at the Copper Wind Resort in Phoenix, near the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. The reporters will be allowed to take notes but not remove or photocopy the records. Campaign officials said they were imposing the restrictions to prevent the actual records from wide dissemination.

Around the same time, campaign officials said, they will post medical summaries of each year from 2000 to 2008 on the campaign Web site. The summaries will not include doctors’ notes in the actual records.

The news organizations in the pool, selected by the campaign, include ABC News, The Arizona Republic, The Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Reuters, The Washington Post and, possibly, a newsmagazine.

Each organization is allowed two representatives and is expected to file a “pool report” for other reporters detailing the information in the records.

It's completely unclear to me why any respectable media organization would agree to this, other than it's coming from John McCain and he makes sweet, sweet barbecue. Even the most experienced reporter isn't entirely equipped to make judgments on medical reports based on three hours of browsing through records without discussing them with doctors or experts. This makes a mockery of journalism and they just lay down and take it.