cytokines

I posted this article about three years ago in the heat of the health care reform debate. I thought that I would post it again. On the Last Word, they talked about how we got here.

This is what I wrote a couple of years ago (psst… we need a single-payer system):

I’ve talked about health care reform over and over again (I don’t see how Joan does it every day without going insane). I’ve talked about healthcare from an emotional standpoint and from an American legislative standpoint. I’ve talked about all the benefits of health care reform. Well, I’d like to take a different tactic. I would like to review the medical literature. I’ve picked several studies which I will describe over the next several days. The one thing that all of these studies have in common is that they point out that health insurance is a predictor of outcome. On Wednesday or Thursday, I’m going to review an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association which clearly states that having a unified health program has survival benefits. (We don’t have a coordinated, organized healthcare system in the United States.)

As a trauma surgeon, I don’t like to talk “shop” with people who are not in the medical profession. As soon as you start mentioning cytokines and mitochondria DNA, most people’s eyes glaze over. But, with watered-down legislation creeping through the Senate at a glacial pace, I thought it was important for me to go over some of this literature. The literature makes approximately the same point that Keith Olbermann made about a month go when he talked about having health insurance being life-and-death. (more…)