Americans of working age die from being uninsured

More Americans between the ages of 25 and 64 die each year (perhaps twice as many) from lack of health insurance than from homicide. This is scandalous. I propose from now on that we leave the term "insurance" completely out of the discussion. Let's say that 220,000 Americans of working age die from lack of access to health care. Now, by leaving insurance out of the discussion, we've changed it from an actuarial problem, or a finger-pointing match to place blame on insurance companies, employers, Medicare, hospitals, HMO's, or whatever, and stated the problem more plainly. If we let the word insurance creep into the discussion, it invariably gets overly complicated and ideological.

What would have kept the people alive is access to health care, and they didn't get it. Mostly (though this isn't proven) they couldn't get care for financial reasons. Most hospitals and clinics won't talk to you if you don't have health coverage. A simple capitalist rule is-- you can't have what you can't afford. For these people it's life.

Our health care system is broken. One of the things that keeps it broken is-- there's no affordable entry-point. Nationally more than 30% of people are uninsured, and are hence functionally locked out of the health care system. Some fraction of them will have routine, treatable conditions which, left untreated, will kill them. And the industry that has been created expressly to take care of them, consuming in the process nearly 20% of our gross national product, has no way to reach them, and vice versa. This is revolting, people!