Bernie Sanders: Coronavirus Reminds Us Why We Must Guarantee Health Care To All

[Uncle Joe]

11. Seriously George! Here is one estimate 45,000 Americans dying every year for that reason,

(snip)

Various studies have looked at whether uninsured people have a higher risk of death. The most cited was published by the American Journal of Public Health in 2009 and found that nearly 45,000 Americans die each year as a direct result of being uninsured.

Dr Andrew Wilper and a team at Harvard Medical School used two main datasets: they took a nationwide US survey of more than 30,000 people conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and checked it against the National Death Index, another national database collected by the CDC.

(snip)

In America, deep inequality can affect the usefulness of data like this. Lots of things can increase an American’s chances of being sick – being a person of color or being poor to name just two – and if those factors overlap with a lack of health insurance, it can be difficult to determine what exactly is affecting an individual’s risk of death.

(snip)

The researchers found that a lack of health insurance had a mortality hazard ratio of 1.40. In other words, they concluded that Americans without health insurance were 40% more likely to die than those with it, even after taking into account the individual’s “gender, age, race/ethnicity, poverty income ratio, education, unemployment, smoking, regular alcohol use, self-rated health, physician-rated health and body mass index”.

(snip)


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/24/us-healthcare-republican-bill-no-coverage-death