Amazing, and recommended.

The myth being that if they had insurance they would have coverage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/15/arkansas-couple-bankrupt_n_318068.html

Stark terms. Lobbying=Death.

Jim,

I think this needs to be front-paged. This is an easily understood concept for the verbally challenged non-thinking sound bite Amerikan…

$263,000,000= 54,000 people insured.
Number of avoidable and needless deaths= 45,000

I like yours better.

I owe you a beverage of your choice.*g*

Well there is that. [Spoilsport! /snark]

Wow. Share that story far and wide, foothillsmike.

*G*

A great comparison, though I’m sure the insurers would say those folks cost a whole lot more than the average to cover…

Well, the lobbying funds are 20% higher than what it costs to cover 45,000 people…

Funds given to the FED would have covered everybody. Alan Grayson has started a campaign called “Unmask the FED”.
********
“Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is up for confirmation to his second term, but he has still refused to disclose where he sent $2 trillion in taxpayers’ money. Send a message to your Senators and ask them to make Bernanke come clean before his confirmation moves forward!”

http://www.unmaskthefed.com/

Their excuses aren’t valid, as Medicare proves, but that’s what they’d say, of course.

Recc’d; powerful point.

Jim white –

That’s what I’m sayin’!

I told my unemployed and uninsured weepublican sister-in-law the same thing months ago.

Actually, for the money the insurance mafia shells out in lobbyists/prostitution fees, bribes, and ads, it could pay for all 47 million uninsured people in the country.

BTW, I’ve been seeing a feel-good commercial on MSNBC and the other networks the last few days, sponsored by the American Free Enterprise Institute. I googled it and, surprise! surprise! it’s conservative group founded by Newt Gingrich. It’s got lots of flags and hard-working folks “living the American dream” — I believe that’s the subliminal message/subtext anyway.

Guess they’re gearing up for the 2010 elections a year ahead of time.

Dividing $263 million by $4824 tells us that 54,500 individuals could have purchased health insurance with the funds spent by the health care sector in their lobbying effort this year.

Ins. execs should be hanging their heads in shame.

The amount of money being spent in an attempt to prevent health care reform is more than enough to purchase insurance for all of those who die due to lack of coverage.

I was guessing this was true, but now to see it actually is true makes me…sick.

thanks jim. great diary.

Great diary, Jim!

I’m only sorry I’m too late to recommend it.

Excellent, Jim, thank you

It is precisely these kinds of honest “comparisons” which may lend much needed perspective to the “reality” of this moment, our moment, allowing a measure of “cost” to be tied to behaviors which are literally being used to destroy American society. Our society.

Our time. Our society. And, OUR nation.

And it all affects our world, and all the human beings who live here, on this essentially pleasant planet, that is rather small and overburdened with deliberate human nonchalance.

DW

Speculation: CNN quoted Cooper because Cooper’s staff gave them a statement and pointed out that Cooper is seen as being in the industry’s pocket.

What he doesn’t point out is the he is one of the House members helping the lobbyists and that most of his district disagree with his position.

“The lobbyists are winning. The lobbyists are winning. Defeat of the left-wing public option is inevitable.” — Got the narrative.

Funds Spent This Year By the Health Care Lobby Would Have Insured All Those Who Died From Lack of Insurance

jim, you have a way with words, I sure hope some progressives use this when they’re interviewed/debated

It is sort of a Super Bowl of lobbying for health care reform.

Guess we should be thankful the thick-headed goober didn’t say it’s like the American Idol/Biggest Loser/Dancing With the Stars, etc., of lobbying. Or something.

The latest from Obama, via Reuters:

“This is when the insurance companies are really going to start gearing up,” Obama told a town-hall event in New Orleans. “Their stock went down when the Senate Finance Committee voted out that bill. Now they’re getting nervous and, by they way, they have been wildly profitable over the last decade.”

Yep, it’s about time he noticed they don’t plan to play nice.

This is when the insurance companies are really going to start gearing up

“This is were we see the violence inherent within the system.” ;)

Yes, they’ve been trying extortion this week (premiums will go up!). It will be very interesting to see next week’s tactic.

It seems that what they have predicted in terms of premium increases is less than it has been for the past ten years.

Actually, it’s worse than your analysis shows. Your analysis uses $4824 as the average premium, but that’s ‘retail’ (includes profit). Think about how any people would be saved if these companies simply provided $263m worth of care instead of spending that amount on lobbying…?

Simply assuming that 20% of the $4824 premium is profit, removing that amount makes the avg cost of care $3859… so $263m could cover 68,000 additional people.

Add to this all the tax dollars that have gone to overtime pay for staffers in Congress and the various executive agencies who have to review and vet all the various proposals, which most people knew never had a chance of passing. What has been the price to the taxpayers for the 9 month kabuki dance.

What has been the price to the taxpayers for the 9 month kabuki dance.

Nine months at 45,000 lives a year comes to just under 34,000 deaths. That’s an obscene price in my book.

Seconded.

This would make a great radio spot. It could also be added to the dollars spent on advertising. Who the hell needs to advertise health insurance? It redirect the very pressure the health insurance cartel is trying to bring, back onto the cartel itself. It gets Americans to start asking where the money comes.

How naive of you, Jim, to think the “industry” would be embarrassed by such indisputable arithmetic. They’re too busy calculating the billions they’ll keep getting when all those freeloaders finally do the right thing, and die. Dead men (and women) pay no premiums.

Its Legalized Murder, true “Death Panels”. When you turn down approval of care and that person dies, THAT IS MURDER.

I wish people would stop trying to spin things to make sense to intelligent people which intelligent thought in America is on life support.

The Insurance Companies deny coverage and people DIE, simple.

We need to redefine the common notions associated with healthcare. Obviously, healthcare is not just being treated by a doctor. Good nutrition is a form of healthcare. Physical exercise is a form of healthcare. National defense is also a form of healthcare. We need to protect our bodies from harmful bacteria, viruses, invading armies, and terrorists. If we, as a nation, are willing to fund national defense initiatives to protect American lives than we should also be willing to federally fund decent healthcare for all Americans to protect their lives.

As a nation, we are obviously willing to spend tremendous human and monetary resources to defend us from external forces. Just considering the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — we have lost many lives; many more have been physically and mentally injured; we have spent billions of dollars on waging the wars; and we have diverted precious human and physical resources away from more economically productive endeavors. In the Iraq war alone, over 4,000 soldiers have died and over 30,000 American soldiers have been injured. By a conservative estimate, the United States military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost our nation well over $900 billion and the cost is steadily increasing.

The military expenditure of human resources and monetary capital has been massively expensive. However, the actual cost is largely a secondary consideration mainly because our nation has been galvanized to defend ourselves from terrorist attacks. We are very motivated in our battle to save American lives from external forces. And because lives are at stake, our national defense has been performed without any notion of budget deficit neutrality. We have demonstrated minimal fiscal discipline to fund our ongoing wars.

National defense is a form of national healthcare. We are quite willing to spend whatever is needed to protect us from external threats. Unfortunately, as a nation, we’re unwilling to protect all of our citizens by providing healthcare for them. Each year many people in this country die because they don’t have healthcare coverage at all or because they don’t have adequate healthcare coverage. Two reputable studies report we currently have either 20,000 or 45,000 people in the US dying each year because of a lack of healthcare coverage (Institute of Medicine study – “Analysis on the Impact of Uninsurance on Mortality” at http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411588_uninsured_dying.pdf and Harvard study – “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults” at http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/2009_harvard_health_study.pdf). If we average the total deaths per year from the 2 studies, that’s 32,500 people dying each year just because they don’t have healthcare coverage.

To most of us, the fact that 32,500 people needlessly die each year is a flat statistic. Please allow me to animate this statistic. The total number of people in the US each year dying for lack of healthcare coverage is approximately the same as the total number of students enrolled at one of our large universities. If this degree of mortality occurred at one university each year from 2001 through 2008, it’s like all the students at the University of Iowa died one year; all the students at the University of Utah died the next year; all the students at Boston University died the next year; all the students at the University of Tennessee died the next year; all the students at George Mason University died the next year; all the students at the Colorado State University died the next year; all the students at the University of Kansas died the next year; and all the students at San Diego State University died the next year. This represents more than 230,000 people who’ve died in 8 years simply because they didn’t have healthcare coverage. This is a grotesque disaster!

President Obama and many members of Congress have stated they want a healthcare reform bill that will not increase the federal deficit. Given the massive number of deaths occurring each year, how can we ever begin to consider that this healthcare problem should only be solved in a manner that doesn’t increase government spending?!? Have we as a people and our democratically-elected representatives lost our minds? I’m outraged at this type of short-sighted and mean-spirited solution. Stop the needless suffering and dying in this country by supporting decent healthcare coverage for all – even if we have to spend some money to do it. It is worth it.

Well written JimWhite. Thanks for catching this.

This is a brilliant stroke to compare these figures, thank you for doing it.

“Of course”, you know, the industry would only patronizingly point out that the numbers aren’t even remotely comparable… See, the only way the industry can currently offer the bargain price of $4000+ per year for health insurance is by averaging cost over usage, meaning that it’s the high percentage of people who don’t make use of health care services (i.e., don’t get sick) that allows the average price to stay low notwithstanding the annoying persistence of those societal burden types (i.e., those who do get sick) who skew the average cost for everyone else. Thus, it is unreasonable to assume that the 45,000 uninsured who die each year due to a need for health services would somehow only cost the “non-inclusive baseline” estimate of $4000 to insure, for if those kinds of people actually were in the system, why, well, it might raise everyone else’s premiums, don’t you know, because these die-prone types constitute exactly the demographic that costs more to treat. In “short”, rather than suggesting that the $263 million spent on lobbying could pay for insurance for the 45,000 uninsured who die annually for want of insurance, the industry undoubtedly views this more as spending $260 million to save the insured population the added and unnecessary expense of insuring a class of persons whose health needs constitute an “excessive burden” upon the ratepaying base because, after all, those “dying uninsured” types are by definition in actual need of costly medical services. So, you see, by spending $263 million lobbying against health care reform, the industry is actually implementing cost-containment measures that are entirely consistent with exactly the philosophy of “Don’t get sick; if you do, die quickly”. Saves money, you know. What?