| By :
Wiley Long
Republican senators filed a legal brief in a federal case in Florida to challenge the requirement for most people to have health insurance in Florida. Republican Rep. John Boehner of Ohio has said, "We think that Obamacare ruined the best healthcare in the country, we believe it will bankrupt our nation, we believe it needs to be repealed and replaced with commonsense reforms to bring down the cost of health insurance." Of course, the cost of health insurance concerns most Americans, but is that the highest priority for most people in our country? Researchers have been plowing through hospital records across the nation to see what the disparity between the have and have nots, when it comes to health insurance, actually costs our people. What they found may surprise you. Health Insurance In Florida Is Not A Luxury From gun shot wounds to trauma injuries, from breast cancer to virtually all the reasons children were admitted to hospitals, people without health insurance die more frequently in hospitals than people with health insurance. It was predictable that if you couldn't afford to go to the hospital, you were more likely to die when injured or sick. Did you expect unequal treatment inside hospitals, as well? Numerous studies have suggested that people without health insurance may have died from poorer quality of hospital care. According to one of the researchers, Sarah M. Lyon, M.D., who is a pulmonary and critical care fellow at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, "The higher mortality for uninsured patients does not appear to be caused by uninsured patients tending to go to hospitals with poor overall quality. Instead, we found that even when admitted to the same hospitals, and controlling for other differences between patients, critically ill individuals without insurance are less likely to survive than those with private or Medicaid insurance." "Less likely to survive" is a relatively mild description of what has been happening in what some people believe is "the wealthiest country in the world." Johns Hopkins researchers have estimated that some 17,000 children died in less than a couple of decades in U.S. hospitals - children who would have lived if only they had been covered by health insurance. Florida Health Insurance And The Constitution Some members of our Congress say they are fighting over the constitutionality of requiring most Americans to have insurance, whether they can afford to buy it or we all chip in to help fund it for those who can't. The right to life was specifically addressed by the Declaration of the thirteen United States of America in one of the most famous statements in our history: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…" How can we reconcile the idea that governments are instituted among us to help us secure the right to life with the higher death rates of hospitalized, uninsured patients? Researchers have documented that uninsured critically ill patients may be less likely to receive certain critical care procedures, including acute hemodialysis, placement of central venous catheters and tracheostomies, than people protected by private insurance or Medicaid. Expanding and standardizing the quality of healthcare that all citizens need through healthcare reform can save lives. Until our "government" raises the value placed on our lives, it's up to you to protect yourself with health insurance in Florida.
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