Thursday, November 12, 2009
A group of Harvard researchers provided a sober reminder on Veterans Day that the current health care reform plan will do nothing to address the problem of veterans who lack medical coverage. According to a team from Harvard Medical School, 2,266 veterans under the age of 65 died in 2008 because they could not get health insurance, and thus medical treatment. That’s significantly more than the number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan last year (155) and twice the number of all fatalities in the war since it began in 2001 (911). It is estimated there were 1.4 million veterans between the ages of 18 and 64 who lacked insurance in 2008.
“On this Veterans Day we should not only honor the nearly 500 soldiers who have died this year in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the more than 2,200 veterans who were killed by our broken health insurance system,” said Dr. David Himmelstein, co-author of the Harvard analysis and associate professor of medicine, in a prepared statement. “That’s six preventable deaths a day.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Over 2,200 Veterans Died in 2008 Due to Lack of Health Insurance (Physicians for a National Health Program)
Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults (American Journal of Public Health) (PDF)
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