About 300 Americans have died because they couldn’t afford health care since I started this count five days ago.
About 50 more will die today.
Since this is turning into a kind of daily witness, I suppose I should document my source for the statistic this is based on.
Michael Moore says in Sicko, and he said on CNN, that 18,000 people die every year in America because they can’t afford health care.
That statistic turns out to be taken from a 2002 report from the Institute of Medicine, entitled “Care Without Coverage: Too Little, Too Late.” You can see it confirmed as accurate here by CNN.
18,000 divided by 365 means 49.3 Americans die every day, on the average, because they’re being denied the health care they need to survive in the most prosperous nation on earth.
Ocelopotamus — Good Morning, Day 51 // Sep 6, 2007 at 11:21 am
[…] It’s been a while since I’ve updated this record — 37 days, to be exact. On July 18 I started keeping count of the 50 U.S. citizens who die every day because they can’t afford health care, according to this statistic. […]