No one should die in America for lack of health insurance. Yet so many people do – one every thirty minutes.

We know we have to change this. It’s one of the great moral issues our country faces. Yet, there are those who say, we can’t afford to cover everyone. I can’t fathom that argument. I believe that all deserve the right to life-saving treatment.

So I was happy to learn that we will soon have an economic argument as well as a moral argument to support making health care available to all.

The Institute of Medicine is about to release a study that reportedly found that, some years after reform is instituted, we  may save up to $250 billion per year over what we’d pay if we did nothing.

That gives us every reason to reform health care and no excuses not to. The moral imperative is obvious, at least to me, as a doctor who has treated both the very poor and the very wealthy. The economic argument should counter those who want to do less or nothing at all.

To save lives (and even, we now learn, to save money), it’s time to provide no loopholes, no fine print, real, affordable health care coverage for all.

– Yvonne  S. Thornton, MD, MPH

UPDATE: The above figures, showing that one person dies every 30 minutes due to lack of health insurance, are from The Institute of Medicine statistics of 2002. A new study, just released today by Harvard Medical School researchers, shows that it’s even worse than that: today, one person dies every 12 minutes due to lack of health insurance.