People Do Die Waiting

                                                             People Do Die Waiting

This is the argument I’ve been making since I heard Mitt Romney make the comment that “ We don't have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don't have insurance" I think most of us know older Americans with lille or no health insurance, who live sheltered lives and are slowly dieing for lack of better care. It's an important reality for our aging society to address and for any society morally. Paul Krugman makes the argument better than I and at sometime in the future when people come to this blog they may just see the note “see Krugman” With time running down until the election that will decide the direction we take as a country here is: Mitt Romney doesn’t see dead people.

Death By Ideology, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Mitt Romney doesn’t see dead people. But that’s only because he doesn’t want to see them; if he did, he’d have to acknowledge the ugly reality of what will happen if he and Paul Ryan get their way on health care.

Last week,... Mr. Romney declared that nobody in America dies because he or she is uninsured: “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.” This followed on an earlier remark by Mr. Romney — echoing an infamous statement by none other than George W. Bush — in which he insisted that emergency rooms provide essential health care to the uninsured.

These are remarkable statements. ... Even the idea that everyone gets urgent care when needed from emergency rooms is false. Yes, hospitals are required ... to treat people in dire need, whether or not they can pay. But ... you will be billed, and ... fear of huge bills can deter the uninsured from visiting the emergency room even when they should. And sometimes they die as a result.

More important, going to the emergency room ... is no substitute for regular care, especially if you have chronic health problems. When such problems are left untreated — as they often are among uninsured Americans — a trip to the emergency room can all too easily come too late to save a life.

So the reality, to which Mr. Romney is somehow blind, is that ... lack of insurance is responsible for thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of excess deaths... But that’s not a fact Mr. Romney wants to admit, because he and his running mate want to repeal Obamacare and slash funding for Medicaid — actions that would take insurance away from some 45 million nonelderly Americans, causing thousands of people to suffer premature death. And their longer-term plans to convert Medicare into Vouchercare would deprive many seniors of adequate coverage,... leading to still more unnecessary mortality. ...

So let’s be brutally honest here. ... Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are proposing trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy. So a literal description of their plan is that they want to expose many Americans to financial insecurity, and let some of them die, so that a handful of already wealthy people can have a higher after-tax income.

It’s not a pretty picture — and you can see why Mr. Romney chooses not to see it.