By Dave Lucas
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Albany, NY – A report released today says the failure to enact health care reform this year will result in thousands of premature deaths in New York... Capital District Bureau Chief Dave Lucas reports.
The failure to enact health care reform this year will lead in the next decade to approximately 13,900 premature deaths of people between 25 and 64 years old in New York according to a report released today by the consumer health group Families USA.
At the national level the report, "Lives on the Line: The Deadly Cost of Delaying Health Reform," warns that the number of deaths would grow from 68 per day in 2010 to 84 per day in 2019.
The Families USA report applies the methodology developed in the groundbreaking report by the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IoM) to estimate national and state deaths due to lack of health coverage. The IoM found that approximately 18,000 non-elderly adults died in the year 2000 due a lack of health coverage. The Urban Institute updated this number and found that at least 22,000 died prematurely due to a lack of health coverage in the year 2006.
A poll by Harris Interactive/HealthDay earlier this month found that half of Americans want some kind of health reform in the next two years, but about 40 percent were not in favor of the legislation proposed by the Democrats.