More uninsured Utahns will die without health reform, report says

SALT LAKE CITY — As some well-insured members of the Legislature swear an oath to sooner die than go along with any federal health care reform, a study released Tuesday projects that in the next decade, 1,200 uninsured Utahns will literally die without it.

It's one thing to make a stand for an ideal during floor debates and in passing legislation against what Utah lawmakers regard as a socialistic takeover of U.S. medicine masked as reform, but it's quite another to face serious illness or death because a person can't get or has lost insurance coverage, according to Dr. Scott Poppen, a Sandy physician who spoke during a teleconference with news media in Utah, Colorado and Nevada.

"Reforms would have worked beautifully" in two recent cases in which inexpensive preventative care would have helped two mid-level income patients with diabetes and no insurance — one of whom "crossed his fingers" and hoped he would OK — who both ended up in the emergency room in serious condition.

"A $50 dose on insulin would have prevented the emergencies from occurring and would have prevented the thousands of dollars in care it took to turn them around," Poppen said.

They are just two real-life examples of medical conditions and the way health care works in America that push people's lives from bad to worse, he said, and such cases are the main reason the national health care consumer research group Families USA decided to plot the past and likely future course of deaths directly linked to lack of insurance. The problem, Poppen and other front-line care providers said, is either invisible or simply considered just part of the U.S. health care system.

The report, "Lives on the Line: The Deadly Cost of Delaying Health Reform," warns that nationwide, the number of deaths of people between 25 and 64 years old would grow from 68 per day in 2010 to 84 per day in 2019.

The report is intentionally being released at what its authors say is a critical time in the latest and "historic" health care reform effort, which is stalled in Congress but is being pushed harder than ever by President Barack Obama and Democrats in recent days.

Meanwhile, Utah lawmakers have proposed and passed several bills and resolutions to keep the federal government out of the state's business in general and out of health care reform efforts specifically.

e-mail: jthalman@desnews.com