44,000......Really?

Michelle Malkin, in her article The Bogus Death Statistic That Won't Die , picks apart the study that Rep. Alan Grayson (D) uses to talk about the 44,000 people in this country that purportedly die due to the fact that they have no medical insurance.

She points out; "Two of the co-authors, Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, are avowed government-run health care activists. Himmelstein co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, which bills itself as "the only national physician organization in the United States dedicated exclusively to implementing a single-payer national health program." Woolhandler is a co-founder and served as secretary of the group."

And these men went to the press, giving them a state by state accounting of the numbers of people dying in each state; "Next, the political doctors cooked up scary-specific death tolls for all 50 states (California -- 5,302, Texas -- 4,675). Newspapers dutifully cited the fear-mongering factoids. The single-payer lobbying group co-founded by Himmelstein and Woolhandler took it from there. Last month, the group set up its own memorial on the National Mall for the phantom 44,000 casualties of uninsurance."

This is just another arrow to toss in your quiver when someone tells you that lack of medical insurance is killing people. Know that there is no proof, and that if someone says that you're killing people because you don't want them to have insurance, tell them to talk to the family and friends of the people that died in Canada and England waiting for they MRI or waiting to see a specialist. Those are numbers you can truly quantify.

In this study, Waiting Your Turn, Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada, 2008 Report , it shows that wait times for referrals from your GP to a specialist can take as much as 19+ weeks, and from referral to treatment by a specialist it can take as much as 36 weeks, (orthopaedic surgery). They only place in the study that showed improvement from when they started keeping track was cardiovascular surgery, which was still an average of 7.3 weeks. Radiation Oncology can take almost 6 weeks until you get treatment.

How many people can go from operable to inoperable stage cancer in 6 weeks? How many people can suffer a fatal heart attack in the 7.3 weeks between GP and treatment? These are the faces, the stories that need to be told.