American lives are at stake

SPOILER: You’re probably going to die in a hospital bed in your sixties, seventies or eighties. The culprit will probably not be terrorism, China or the government coming for your guns. It will be heart disease or cancer.

By and large, Americans die of disease. And too many of us die of diseases that are preventable. According to a Harvard Study, 45,000 of us die every year for lack of insurance. And this is as we spend more money per capita and get worse results than any industrialized country in the world.

This new Priorities USA ad finally makes the connections between a lack of financial stability, a lack of health insurance and death. Yes, death. People die because they lack health insurance and more will die if Romney wins and the Affordable Care Act is repealed. That point needs to be made.



This woman died because she lacked insurance. Like too many Americans, she waited till the last possible moment to seek care. And since we all pay for each other’s health care, we ending paying for a huge percentage of it during the last days when little can be done. Is this Mitt Romney’s fault? No. Does he want to take health care away from millions of Americans? Absolutely.

And Republicans are furious that someone is finally saying that Americans die because of our insane health care system and more will die if Romney wins. Conservatives are willing to use the threat of death by foreign interest to scare you into anything they want. But use the real life fear of what actually kills us and suddenly you’ve gone too far.

Now is the time to go too far, then. Because what the Republicans are planning means that we’ll pay more for health care and get less of it. And Americans will die. We can prevent that if we’re willing to say what’s at stake.

[CC image by mah_japan]