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Access, Access, Access

First, a question: When in American history did life expectancy improve the most?

Was it the late 1800s, when anesthesia made surgery easier and far more common? Was it the 1930s, when antibacterial medicines became available? Or recent decades, when CAT scans and heart bypasses proliferated?

The correct answer is: none of the above. While data differ and the statistics aren’t fully reliable, a good bet is that the best answer is the 1940s. In that period, life expectancy increased about seven years.

Indeed, American life expectancy appears to have been longer in 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945 — even as hundreds of thousands of young Americans were being killed in World War II — than it had been when America was at peace in 1940.

A prime reason is that with the war mobilization, Americans got much better access to medical care. Farmers and workers who had rarely seen doctors now found themselves with medical coverage through the military, jobs in industry or New Deal programs.

In short, great health care is often less about breakthrough technologies than it is about access. And for all the disagreements about President Obama’s health care proposal, let’s focus on this: it unquestionably would increase access, while its defeat would diminish access.

Most of American history has seen a steady increase in access to first-rate health care. But we’re now seeing a reversal of this long trend. A new report has found that one-quarter of Californians are now uninsured.

The reason for the declining access? Our politicians’ ignominious failure over the last half-century to provide universal health care, despite the efforts of Democratic and Republican presidents alike to pass it. It’s astonishing that Republicans today are lined up overwhelmingly against a health care package that is more modest and moderate than one that Richard Nixon proposed in the early ’70s.

If Republicans succeed in killing Mr. Obama’s reform package, the share of Americans with medical coverage will continue to drop. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimated this month that if significant reforms do not pass, the number of uninsured Americans could grow by 10 million over just the next five years.

Partly because of lack of access, American health statistics are notorious: Our children are two-and-a-half times as likely to die before the age of 5 as children in Sweden. American women are 11 times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as Irish women. The average person in Honduras or Vietnam is expected to live longer than the average African-American in New Orleans.

Opponents of health care reform claim that America’s health statistics are poor simply because of America’s racial diversity and large underclass. But there is one group of Americans who do fine in international comparisons — and that’s the 65-plus crowd. They have Medicare.

One careful study after another has shown that uninsured people are significantly more likely to die than insured people. That’s because diseases are caught at later stages on uninsured people, and they don’t get treated so well.

Continues @ New York Times

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That is certainly a lost more reason to support HCR than the President has articulated.

The bil may not be everything that we want but it may give a lot to what a lot of people presently have (via subsidies to get insurance). 

So, even though it does not have a public option, it may be ok... PROVIDED, THEY DO NOT INCLUDE STUPAK BILL WITH IT. I really really do not want us to lose the decades of work done on women's right over their own body in the process of this bill.

I think eventually, the pain point on insurance will become so big that there will be an outcry for public option, and at that time, it will happen.