An organization that has been very active in the push for national health care is at it again. Families USA recently provided a series of Press Releases that heralded the number of deaths per state that could be blamed on a lack of health insurance. Wisconsin's estimate was 250 deaths per year. This is the same group that was instrumental in 'creating' 47 million uninsured people in the United States. That has been repeated often enough so as to have become thought of as a "fact". The real numbers are closer to 10 million as I've discussed before, but bigger numbers help raise awareness faster. So let us not be constrained by facts. Let us simply create the facts we desire.
Rep. Steve Kagen (D), congressional representative from the Appleton area, couldn't help but jump on this latest bandwagon just as he had jumped aboard the first. He participated in a teleconference on this subject and opined that there were between 59,000 and 89,000 uninsured in his district. I have no idea of how he came to this conclusion; and, it is possible that he has no idea how he reached that conclusion either.
Families USA has apparently decided that there will be greater impact on people if they now begin to tell us how many people died due to lack of health insurance coverage, rather than to continue to harp about the mythical 47 million any longer. So, they adopted the study by the Urban Institute done last year that estimated 22,000 people die each year because they lack health insurance. A health care economist has described this estimate as a "statistical guess". From this "statistical guess" they extrapolated the "fact" that this equated to 250 deaths in Wisconsin. And just today we saw the report that Wisconsin ranked second nationally in health care quality. That just doesn't square with this "statistical guess" scare tactic.
As for 'real' facts, there is an even more interesting study, published by the Hospital Infection group (at www.hospitalinfection.org) that I would've thought Dr. Kagen could see fit to get behind sooner:
Hospital infections cause five times the deaths attributed to lack of health insurance, and the majority of states keep the rates of deaths by infection per hospital secret. And that could be prevented in most part.
Now there's a real cause for the Doctor/Congressman.
