As part of the healthcare debate, Obama and his leftist subjects, including politicians and the media, keep using a number, and a line of crap, as one of their selling points to force everyone to get on board with our inept government taking over healthcare. The quote I’m referring to goes something like this… “Some 40,000 people die each year because they have no health insurance”. How they know that this figure is anywhere near accurate is anyone’s guess. Considering how skeptical I am of anything that comes out of the Obama administration I’m guessing someone just made it up. What if I played Devils advocate for a moment and pretended that they meant to say… “Some 40,000 people die each year because they received no health care”, I would still like to know how they even came up with that figure.
I’m even going to help add confusion to this problem… Back in 2001 there were an approximately 2,392,547 people who died in the USA. Sorry, but those were some of the best numbers I could find, so you have to use a little common sense. As the population of the USA increased every year since 2001, so did the number of people that died. Below is a chart of the common causes of death in the United States. Both the chart below and the 2,392,547 were figures taken from supposedly reliable sources, yet take the numbers from the chart and add them up, they don’t even come close to over 2 million deaths.
If you hear anyone use this argument you can now safely claim… they are full of sh”it”!
Gio-
Annual Causes of Death in the United States
| Tobacco | 435,000 |
| Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity | 365,000 |
| Alcohol | 85,000 |
| Microbial Agents | 75,000 |
| Toxic Agents | 55,000 |
| Motor Vehicle Crashes | 26,347 |
| Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs | 32,000 |
| Suicide | 30,622 |
| Incidents Involving Firearms | 29,000 |
| Homicide | 20,308 |
| Sexual Behaviors | 20,000 |
| All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect | 17,000 |
| Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Such As Aspirin | 7,600 |
Gio, there is something missing on your list. The CDC estimates an average of 36,000 people a year die from the Flu in the US. http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm
Now it is debatable how preventable this disease is as far as any advocacy for government run health care. You can disinfect your hands all you want, but you can’t possibly know when the virus is breathed in or landed on your body at any given moment. BTW – none of those preventive measures would require government sponsored health care, washing hands with soap and using an alcohol based disinfectant would not be paid for by them in any event.
Furthermore, as H1N1 is showing, no matter how healthy you thought you were, there is no guarantee that your body can handle any given strain of the Flu. The normal treatment for the Flu is bed rest AT HOME, take something for the fever and drink lots of liquids. You don’t go to the hospital for the normal course of the Flu. Therefore since any life threatening situation involving the Flu would land you in the emergency room, under our current system you would be treated until stabilized thus government run health care would not do any better.