People Without Health Insurance Live In Fear
So says Democrat candidate for Governor of North Dakota Tim Mathern:
We all know that people who do not have health insurance live in fear. They may have to go into debt to pay for health care or forgo medical care altogether.
But, what many people don’t realize is that a lack of health insurance can also result in premature death.
A new report by Families USA found that between 2000 and 2006, 200 people in North Dakota between the ages of 25 and 64 died prematurely because of a lack of health insurance.
I find it rather hard to believe that, with all the variables that make up an individuals health profile, that a simple lack of health insurance can be singled out as the cause of death for those 200 people. But even if it’s true (and I doubt that it is) we’re talking about 33 people a year in a state of 635,000 people.
Certainly nobody likes death, but that’s a rather small number compared to the rest of the world.
Mathern suggests in his editorial that he will address the issue of insurance for the uninsured if he is elected Governor. But I ask you this: Do we want a solution to this problem that is worse than the problem itself?
Liberals like Mathern are quite fond of government-mandated and/or government-run health care. Yet we routinely hear of horror stories from people living in such systems from all over the world. We hear of people in Canada who must come to America to get their brain tumors treated in a timely fashion. We hear of people in Great Britain forced to travel to other countries to get orthopedic surgeries. We hear of people in Sweden forced to wait years for procedures like gall bladder removals.
I’ll not argue that the health care system in America is perfect, but do we really want to drag the quality of care in America down to the lowest common denominator just to extend coverage to the scant minority that can’t afford it? The vast majority of North Dakotans, and Americans in general, enjoy plentiful access to health care. Why leverage that situation to solve a problem that isn’t much of a problem to begin with? I think most Americans would rather take their chances in a free market health care system than be tied to a government-run system that, while universal in access, may be worse overall coverage than what we’re getting now.
As Thomas Jefferson once said, it is better to attend to the problems of too much freedom than the problems of too little.
MikeAdamson
robert108
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