When Republican politicians and right-wing talking heads bemoan the
fictitious “death panels” that they claim would arise from health-care
reform, they are concealing a sinister reality from their followers.
The ugly fact is that, every year we fail to reform the existing
system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die
— either because they have no insurance or because their
insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.
The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of
working age due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least
20,000, according to studies conducted over the past decade by medical
researchers, and is almost certainly rising as more and more people
lose their coverage as costs continue to go up and unemployment
rises.
They die primarily because they didn’t have the coverage or the
money to pay doctors and thus delayed seeking treatment until it was
too late. They don’t get checkups, screenings, and other preventive
care. That is why uninsured adults are far more likely to be diagnosed
with a disease such as cancer or heart disease at an advanced stage,
which severely reduces their chances of survival.
This isn’t news. Seven years ago, the Institute of Medicine found
that approximately 18,000 Americans had died in 2000 because they had
no insurance. Using the same methodology combined with Census Bureau
estimates of health coverage, the Urban Institute concluded that the
incidence of death among the uninsured was enormous. Between 2000 and
2006, the last year of that study, the total number of dead was
estimated to have reached 137,000 — a body count more than double
the number of casualties in the Vietnam War.
The Institute of Medicine also found that uninsured adults are 25
percent more likely to die prematurely than adults with private health
insurance, and other studies have warned that uninsured adults between
the ages of 55 and 64 are even more prone to die prematurely. A lack of
health insurance is the third-leading cause of death for that age
cohort, following heart disease and cancer.
All those appalling figures, which are real rather than mythical, do
not include the casualties of insurance company profiteering —
namely, all the people, including small children, who perish because of
the anonymous “death panels” that deny or delay coverage to consumers.
Perhaps the most notorious case in recent years was that of Nataline
Sarkisyan, the 17-year-old leukemia patient whose liver transplant was
held up by insurance giant Cigna HealthCare. She died for no reason
except to protect Cigna’s profit margin, but her unnecessary and cruel
demise was hardly unique.
Research by the American Medical Association found that the nation’s
largest insurance companies deny somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of
all the claims submitted by doctors. That rough estimate is the best
available because private insurers are not required to reveal such
statistics (although they certainly maintain them) and the government
does not collect them. But in June, a House Energy and Commerce
Committee investigation found that three major insurance companies
— Golden Rule, Assurant, and WellPoint — rescinded the
coverage of at least 20,000 people between 2003 and 2007 for minor
errors, including typos, on their paperwork; a preexisting condition;
or a family member’s medical history.
“They try to find something — anything — so they can say
that this individual was not truthful,” said Representative Henry
Waxman, the California Democrat who oversaw the committee probe. He
warned that insurance companies launch these nitpicking inquisitions
whenever a policyholder becomes ill with a certain kind of condition
— usually a costly and deadly one such as ovarian cancer or
leukemia. The result is denial and loss of coverage — and we now
know that means increased mortality for innocent people.
So who are the members of the death panels? You can find them among
the corporate bureaucrats who concoct excuses to deny coverage and
throw the sick off their rolls. You can find them among the politicians
and lobbyists who have stalled reform for years while people died. You
can find them among the morons who show up to shout slogans at town
halls rather than seek solutions. And you can find them among the cable
and radio blabbers who invent scary stories about reform to conceal the
sickening truth.
