This was some speech from Keith Olbermann's show from October 13, 2009. I don't even think I need to commentate on it at all. Just let it soak in. Then you will need a shower.
OLBERMAN: “…my dad … luckier than at least 45,000 Americans, because as discovered in a new study conducted by Harvard University and the Cambridge Health Alliance, that’s how many of us are dying each year because we don’t have insurance.
The number is horrible. But when it’s contrasted to what faced my father that night, it is unforgivable, because as Cambridge’s summary of the findings put it: deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease.”
OLBERMANN: My father had less to fear that night from bad kidneys than he would have if he hadn’t had insurance. And yet we let this continue. You and I, this society, our country, Democrats and Republicans, this is the study that congressman from Florida quoted, about which the Republicans demanded an apology when they should have been standing there shrieking, demanding that we fix this.
OLBERMANN: Uninsured working age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts. People, in short, are dying for lack of money.
Dying as surely as they did when Charles Dickens wrote about the exact same problem, a boy who couldn’t get sufficient medical care for his affliction, of the underprivileged suffering not just privation but death as an uncomfortable mode silently and unseeingly through the streets of London. The book was called “A Christmas Carol” and the boy Dickens imagined was called “Tiny Tim.” And it was published on the 19th of December, 1843.
It is 166 years later and the problem is not only still with us, it is getting worse. The mortality rate among Americans under the age of 65 who are uninsured is 40 percent higher than those with insurance. In 1993, a similar study found the difference was only 20 percent. We are moving backwards.
We are letting people die because they do not have insurance? What’s worst is that barring meaningful health care reform now, this will only grow. The difference between the surveys from 1993 and now suggest: this fatal insurance gap is growing by about 1 percent per year. Your chances of dying because you don’t have insurance are now 40 percent higher than those who have it. By extrapolation, three years from now, your chances will be 43 percent higher.
OLBERMANN: Your chances of dying because you used to smoke compared to those who never smoked, are only 42 percent higher. You heard that right! At the current rate in 2012, you will be more fortunate, more secure, more long-lived if you used to SMOKE than if you don’t have insurance!!
OLBERMANN: This is the country you want? This is the country you will accept? Do those other people in this country have meaning to you? Or are they just extras in your movies? Backgrounds in your painting? Choruses in your solo?
Without access to insurance for all of us, and the only way we get it is with the government supplying the gaps-just like it does in flood insurance for God’s sake-that fatal gap will just keep growing. The 45 percent higher likelihood of death for the uninsured compared to the insured by 2014. By 2022, the figure will be 53 percent higher — 53 percent.
