WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.
Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.
So here's some additional justification as to why I have such vituperative, negative feelings against conservatives of the right-wingish kind. You tell one of these "super patriot" (and they are super patriots, because they remind you of it incessantly) wingnuts that some insane muslim terrorists just killed 3,000 Americans and hoo boy, they're ready for war -- ready to send little Johnny and little Sally off to a foreign land to kill and die for the fatherland. Ready to bankrupt the national treasury for a little blood revenge. Ready to allow their leaders to use The Constitution as a wad of toilet paper to wipe their asses with.
But you just try to tell this same conservative that lack of access to basic health care kills 45,000 of his fellow Americans every year, and he just shrugs his shoulders and says, "oh well, probably just a bunch of lazy welfare bums that deserved it anyway - it ain't my problem."
And I guess that in a nutshell explains why I'm not on their side.
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