45,000 Dead

There are 45,000 people are dead in this country for lack of health care. That's according to Dr. Quentin Young speaking before an audience of Tenth Dems University students in Lincolnshire last night. He said the figure comes from a recent study to be published in the American Journal of Public Health today. That's up from 18,000 in 2002.

Other news from the Tenth Dems University class titled Reforming Health Care: Can We Afford the Status Quo? includes a lack of tea partiers and something I have known for a very long time, that the arguable reform alternative was single payer all along. Speaker David Dranove, PhD, a health care managment Prof. at the Kellogg School of Management revealed himself as a republican and said he waivers between wanting to leave everything to the free marked and wanting a single payer system. Then, he made a very credible argument for single payer. Intentionally.

I think the lack of tea partiers could have a few causes. The first possiblity that comes to mind is that the fun has gone out of the tea parties. The second is the sheer strength of the Tenth Dems and their fear of being outnumbered. However, the third possiblity I came up with might just be it, they didn't want to start up with a group of credentialed experts that included prominent doctors, economists and health care managers. The panel was very impressive and I'm thinking false "death panels" and "socialism" arguments would have been easily rebutted.

I'll write more about this tomorrow including the economics lesson we got from The Concord Coalition, Dr. Young's idea for what we can do now and what we can do in the future, and the three main health care issues according to the republican management speaker. Newsflash to Mark Kirk, tort reform was mentioned as something that might help an "iota", but was not on the list. I'll also name drop who interesting (besides me of course) was in the audience.