1115.org

When Roll Call described the Republican healthcare reform strategy as “delay, define and derail”, they missed one key element: deny.

Here’s Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl putting on a fine exhibition of this key element:

On “Meet the Press” yesterday, host David Gregory asked Kyl a very good question: “[Y]ou and other Republicans have said this healthcare reform should be opposed, and one of the major reasons you cite is how much money it costs, how much it could potentially add to the deficit, although the president says it’ll be deficit-neutral. And yet when you talk about the war in Afghanistan and the commanders should have more of their troops, I’ve never heard you say that that should be deficit-neutral, that war costs should somehow not break the bank. Why is that disparity there?”

Kyl responded by saying we can’t “scrimp and save or try to win a war on the cheap,” adding that the conflict in Afghanistan “is a war of necessity,” because of 9/11. Gregory followed up, asking whether it might also be a “necessity” to address the fact that “more and more Americans who die because they don’t have access to health insurance.”

Kyl replied, “I’m not sure that it’s a fact that more and more people die because they don’t have health insurance; but because they don’t have health insurance, the care is not delivered in the best and most efficient way.”

In fact, the Harvard study referenced in the last post makes it very clear that more and more people are indeed dying because they don’t have access to health insurance:

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
[...]
An (sic) similar study in 1993 found those without insurance had a 25 percent greater risk of death, according to the Harvard group. The Institute of Medicine later used that data in its 2002 estimate showing about 18,000 people a year died because they lacked coverage.

Part of the increased risk now is due to the growing ranks of the uninsured, Himmelstein said. Roughly 46.3 million people in the United States lacked coverage in 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last week, up from 45.7 million in 2007.

Another factor is that there are fewer places for the uninsured to get good care. Public hospitals and clinics are shuttering or scaling back across the country in cities like New Orleans, Detroit and others, he said.

Study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said the findings show that without proper care, uninsured people are more likely to die from complications associated with preventable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

So does Senator Kyl have his head firmly lodged in a very unsalubrious place? Or does he just have a pathologically dishonest definition of “more and more” or “dying”?