According to a recent Harvard Medical School study via Rueters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

“We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,” Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

To begin, we should take note of the wording itself as the 45K number is logically very tough to substantiate.  The report itself states these people died “in large part” due to lack of insurance, noting in the wording the difficulty of the definition.  Not only would you need to find people who might have lived with insurance, but I think you should also remove those people who could afford it but chose not to (usually younger professionals with a belief that they don’t need it).

Having said that, even if we assume the 45K number is accurate, it is true that it’s higher than both homicide and drunk driving rates combined at around about 30K deaths a year.

Using the 45K & the “ideal” $200 billion a year (CBO reports government health care spending with the new bill will be 1 trillion in new spending over the next ten years), we would be spending about 4.5 million for each life saved.  This assumes that the government projections are correct, which we know history shows us it’s likely to cost much, much more.  & it assumes that giving them insurance would truly save lives.

The difference in the analogy therefore is that no one in congress is currently setting up a bill where will spend an additional 4.5 million dollars per homicide & drunk driving deaths in order to save those lives.

I recognize for some, cost/benefit analysis is by definition wrong since human life is sacred, but we have to recognize that spending 4.5 million on say cancer or heart disease research is likely to save many, many more lives than spending it on the current health care plan.

Globally, spending this much money on portable water, malaria drugs, childhood vaccinations, and other fairly cheap solutions would save literally tens of millions of people each year.

I know – cold-blooded, heartless, etc – but given my current income level, I wouldn’t even force my own family to come up with 4.5 million to save me, much less think it’s my neighbor’s responsibility to pony up part of the cash through the force of law to do so.

He starts off telling us why when he rides a bicycle to work, he feels a sense of self satisfaction and since most trips are made to destinations less than 5 miles away, we should all take his advice in order to feel as good as he did.

Leaving aside the fact that not everyone lives in the constantly sunny state of CA and how impractical this would be for most people, I think he also lacks a basic understanding that citizen mobility has increased options for poorest segments of our society.  The ability to be mobile, utilizing cars even, has helped countless people be able to move quickly to places where jobs are more plentiful and higher paying, instead of sticking to where they currently reside.

Even having said that, like most celebrities, he takes his ignorance on the entire subject and moves into the land of the crazy, completely out of touch idiots (whole thing here):

…The automobile took us further and faster than we could have ever done by self-propulsion. But that speed and distance has brought the world to the edge of extinction. We must now look at the automobile with an understanding of what it really is. We must look at the movies and songs that celebrated the automobile with a new consciousness and awareness. We must look at the automobile as a cigarette–a cancer stick–a nail in our collective coffin. The sexy lifestyle that the tobacco industry sold to us contains the same advertising lies and poison which the automobile industry sold and continues to sell to the world. Look at the ads for automobiles and you’ll begin to recognize the lies…

I would hazard a guess though that if he can allow him to do the mental twisting that requires this analogy, it also allows him to rationalize what is most likely his extremely self-righteous attitude towards others who don’t feel the same way.

I wonder if he understands that with smugness like this, he shares more in common with TV evangelists than he does with anything resembling rational, thoughtful adults?

One thing is for certain, if the public debate about environmentalism continues to be told by politicans and celebrities, it’s more likley their cure will be much worse than the problem they are seeking to avoid.