In a December 2011 speech to college students during the Iowa caucases, Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum responded to a question by a student citing a public health study concluding that 50,000 to 100,000 Americans die annually due to lack of health insurance:
“I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance. People die in America because people die in America. And people make
poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And
they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when
they need to. And it’s not the fault of the government for
not providing some sort of universal benefit.
While I can't speak to the validity of the study in question, his response got me thinking about an opposite question: How many Americans are alive because of health insurance? I am not aware of a study on this particular topic or if that is even possible. However, I do know one person who may not be alive were it not for insurance coverage. For you statisticians out there, N=1 is hardly an acceptable sample size for a reliable or valid study but in this case I'm going to say the sample is more than enough because that "1" is me.
I have a disease called Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy which started when I was seventeen years old. According to my neurologist my disease will likely continue for the rest of my life. Epilepsy is a neurological condition which causes me to experience tonic-clonic seizures (also known as grand mal seizures) unless I take medication twice daily. During a seizure I lose consciousness (so I have never actually seen myself have one). All of your muscles get super tense (the tonic portion) and then start to contract and relax really fast in an uncoordinated way (the clonic portion). Unmedicated people with this condition have gotten into lethal car accidents hurting themselves and others. As a result of my health insurance coverage, I am able to afford a very expensive medication that helps keep me and everyone around me safe from such accidents whether its while I'm driving a car or riding my bicycle. Due to this medication, adequately subsidized by my excellent insurance, I live seizure-free.
In defense of Mr. Santorum, I don't think he intended to describe people like myself who live with chronic illnesses of unclear etiology that require constant treatment. However, I wonder if he would reexamine this statement in the context of the effect the uninsured population might have on the insured population like himself and his family. In a way I am encouraging him (and others) who don't believe in the value of providing insurance to all Americans to indulge in a bit of narcissism as an indirect road to empathy. People with manageable diseases like epilepsy, preventable diseases like obesity, and infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS don't just affect the uninsured. A pregnant woman with a gold-plated insurance plan (the so-called 'Cadillac' insurance plans) who comes into contact with an uninsured citizen on the subway who happens to have tuberculosis, a well-understood and treatable disease, is going to be in trouble. Her expensive insurance plan may help her out but at best it will be playing a sad game of 'catch-up' for both her and her unborn child due to the transmission of a disease that could have been avoided with earlier management for the person with tuberculosis.
Mr. Santorum's comments speak to the short-sighted "not-in-my-backyard" thinking that has made reasonable healthcare reform difficult if not impossible. Disease is pervasive, a burden both in personal suffering and in national financial cost. While I am a proponent of universal healthcare, I acknowledge that I don't know how it would work. The problems are seemingly innumerous and the solution beyond the scope of this article. My point is that whether or not people die from not having healthcare in America, I am absolutely sure that without health care for all, more people are likely to get sick because disease does not operate in a vacuum. The insured do not walk around in a Good Health Bubble protecting them from disease. Disease slides effortlessly through rich and poor populations and puts its hands into everyone's pocketbooks. Therefore, as a country we could help everyone (including the already insured) by providing baseline insurance for everyone which would 1) put up road blocks to easily transmittable diseases and 2) effectively lessen the burden of suffering and unmanageable cost. If everyone had health coverage providing annual doctor's visits, up-to-date preventative care, comprehensive pre- and post-natal care, frequent follow-up checks and affordable medications, perhaps the Santorum maxim would be true and maybe even indisputable: People die in America because people die in America.
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