Why Now

Information About
Why This is an Urgent Matter

The U.S. Crisis Gets Worse Every Year … even though we have not been calling it a crisis!

• Our Life Expectancy has been dropping in comparison to other countries
  • As per the World Health Organization: the U.S. was 27th and is now 30th
  • As per the CIA: the U.S. was 47th and is now 50th
  • As compared to six top-performing free-market countries (France, Japan, Australia, Spain, Italy and Canada), our life expectancy is three years shorter for our 310 million people compared to their 375 million people
  • See the details for all of this at the Life Expectancy web page
• Increase in unnecessary deaths regarding preventable diseases
  • U.S. was 15th out of 19 countries
  • U.S. now 19th out of 19 countries
  • An estimated 75,000 to 101,000 unnecessary deaths in the United States per year under age 75; 277 per day; 1 every 5 minutes
    • See Real People
    • See Amenable Mortality
• Increase in deaths of the U.S. uninsured
  • Had 18,000 deaths per year
  • Now 22,000 deaths per year (which may be a subset of the 75,000 to 101,000);
    another study estimates that number to be 45,000 deaths per year
    • See Real People for a full explanation of these numbers with the sources of the information
    • Conclusion: people you see or know who have a preventable disease involving years of pain and suffering, then death, may be part of this huge statistic of poor U.S. health care performance
• Increased number of people at risk
  • An amazingly high 42% for the combination of the number of persons under age 65 who are uninsured or undersinsured. That was BEFORE the economic downturn and its resulting increase in the number of uninsured.
  • Thus, the reality of possible financial ruin had already started to hit the middle and upper class, but the possibility for them is higher than ever
  • The “underinsured” are individuals who have insurance but they are dangerously close to being in financial stress or disaster if they need any significant amount of medical care.
  • ” … a sharp increase in the number of underinsured people. Based on indicators of cost exposure relative to income, as of 2007 an estimated twenty-five million insured people ages 19-64 were underinsured – a 60 percent increase (in the underinsured) since 2003. The rate of increase was steepest among those with incomes above 200 percent of poverty, where underinsurance rates nearly tripled (for persons in higher income brackets). In total, 42 percent of U.S. adults were underinsured or uninsured. The underinsured report high levels of access problems and financial stress. … ” – the Abstract of the Health Affairs article listed below in References. Bolding was added.

Additional Reasons to Consider

People’s Input: single-payer

• Six to seven years is long enough to wait after the peoples’ input in 2006 that single-payer is needed
  • “Citizens Health Care Working Group”
    • Established by the U.S. Congress to get input
    • The report to the U.S. Congress was provided in September 2006

The Original Medicare Implementation Took One Year Without Computers

Additional Information

• Overwhelming Support for a national health program was reported by the U.S. Congress’ Citizens’ Health Care Working Group in September 2006
• The United States’ current single-payer national health insurance for seniors, Medicare, was enacted by law in 1965, implemented in 1966 and fully in use by 1967 without the help of today’s extensive network of powerful computer systems. [Note: the H.R. 676 proposed legislation specifies that the law being established in 2012 will be effective on 1/1/14.]
• See Education for more information.
• Number of Uninsured and Underinsured
  • “How Many Are Underinsured? Trends Among U.S. Adults, 2003 and 2007” – June 2008 report in Health Affairs magazine 27, no. 4 (2008). Additional parts of that report are seen here.
  • Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance, 9/17/2009
  • http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE58G6W520090917

We Need Improved Medicare for All