The Sorensen Monologues
Archive for April 4th, 2012
This Week’s Cartoon: If Buying Health Insurance Were Like Buying Broccoli
Congratulations, America! Decades upon decades of struggle for a more civilized health insurance system now rest in the hands of your smug, Newsmax-reading uncle. Or his highly-trained, yet no less ignorant equivalents.
A report from 2010 suggests that 275,000 will die due to lack of health insurance over the following decade. Harvard puts the number at 45,000 per year. That’s far, far greater than the number who perished on September 11. And the judges who will be deciding the fate of those hundreds of thousands of lives — most of whom I suspect have never had to deal with the incredible cruelties faced by those whose jobs do not provide insurance — cannot distinguish a health insurance system from a cruciferous vegetable. I didn’t have room to go into the more complex economic issues about risk-sharing which make broccoli an especially poor analogy, but hey, you can only do so much in a cartoon.
