Mitt Romney revealed his cluelessness and lack of understanding for those without health insurance last week in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, where he ignorantly purported that no one dies in America due to lack of health insurance.
“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’ ” ... “No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.” ...
Well, The Center for Disease Control estimates that a minimum of 45,000 people die each year due to lack of health care.
Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health. That figure is about two and a half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2002.
The study, conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.
This study controlled for socioeconomic, and behavioral factors as well as baseline health.
Also, a few days ago, Sanja Gupta pointed out that it is not true that hospitals and charities "pick up the tab" after uninsured people have to go to the emergency rooms. The truth is that collection agencies get these accounts and hound the poor for years, often into bankruptcy.
In his debate with President Obama, Mitt Romney falsely claimed people with pre-existing conditions could get coverage under his plan, but then his campaign issued a clarification that this was not the case, and it would be left up to states - states which under Paul Ryan's budget will have vastly less money because the Romney-Ryan Duo of Doom intends to slash their Medicaid funding.
Mitt Romney has not suggested how are states going to pay for this coverage. Why will they do it when he is president if they haven't done it already? Why will he find his reforms any easier to pass than President Obama did? Why are more journalists not asking these kinds of substantive questions?
Yesterday, teacherken reported Paul Krugman's scathing takedown of Romney's ignorance in Paul Krugman: Death by Ideology+*. Here's a link to Paul Krugman's Death by Ideology.
It seems bizarre to me that anyone can suggest that Mitt Romney won this debate when making such a flagrant and intentional lies. Even though this next debate is about foreign policy, I hope President Obama creates an opportunity to correct these two major Romney distortions of truth.
And, how many times can Mitt Romney prove he is totally clueless about the challenges of ordinary people before the American voters believe it?
