Yes, and that 45,000 uninsured Americans die every year for no other reason than that they do not have insurance.
Does that matter? I don't think it does.
Immie
Not true. Here is how they came up with that figure:
A health survey is conducted between 1988 and 1994. A questionnaire is given to 9000 people. They are asked if they were insured and then asked to rate the state of their own health.
The Centers for Disease Control tracks the deaths of any of these 9000 people through the year 2000.
Along come two Doctors names Himmelstein and Woolhandler. These two are strong proponents of a single-payer government health insurance program. Himmelstein is the co-founder of a group called "Physicians for a National Health Program." Woolhandler is also a co-founder. The group is dedicated to "implementing a single-payer national health program.
Himmelstein and Woolhandler decide to take the data from the CDC study and use it to write a study for the American Journal of Public Health. That study was published last December.
When writing their article for the AJPH Himmelstein and Woolhandler decide that every single person in the study group that initially reported that they did not have health insurance did, in fact, die because they weren't insured.
No verification was ever made that the study who said they weren't insured were not, in fact, insured.
No attempt was made to discover whether or not these people actually got health insurance before they died.
No attempt was made to determine whether or not the deaths of these people could be attributed to a lack of treatment due to their uninsured status.
To make this simple ... Himmelstein and Woolhandler just assumed that if one of these people reported between 1988 and 1994 that they were uninsured, and if they then died by the end of 2000, the only reason they could have died was because they were uninsured.
FIGURES LIE AND LIARS FIGURE - Nealz Nuze on boortz.com
And still more on that figure.
Marginal Revolution: How many people die from lack of health insurance?
I know it looks impressive throwing those kind of numbers around but the fact is, when researched, it is simply not true.