The Moral Argument [Bryan]

There are many things I don't fully understand about American health care system, or the debates about reform. I have tried to read carefully about what is being proposed, and I'm still not sure I understand what a "health care co-op" is, or how it is supposed to work. I don't fully understand the proposed cost savings, and somewhat doubt that all the desired savings will materialize. Many of the proposals sound like great ideas to my untrained ear, but I'm really in no position to judge or to predict the future. Even the best intentioned and most carefully reasoned policies can have unexpected outcomes.

Still, there is one thing that I think I do understand: The current system is a moral travesty. A recent study by the Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that 45,000 people, on average, die each year because they do not have health insurance, even controlling for all the different variables. This is, admittedly, on the high side of estimates I've read about. An earlier Institute of Medicine study, for example, estimated that 20,000 people a year die because of lack of access. This does not even take into account those who have insurance, but are denied coverage related to necessary treatments.

Let's take the lower number. Suppose terrorists were killing 20,000 people a year in this country. Remember that 3,000 people died on 9/11 and the country went berserk. Yet we are strangely indifferent to a situation in which about 7 times that number die every single year. It seems that if 20,000 people a year were dying from terrorists attacks we would want to try something, anything, to stop it.