WE'LL TAKE OUR CHANCES

by Paul Gibbs

Since getting involved with the campaign for Medicaid expansion/Healthy Utah, I've heard a lot of what I'll be kind and call spurious arguments from its opponents. Each month the concerns stated by opponents in the Utah Health Reform Task Force in their meeting get more surprising and outrageous. But yesterday, Rep. Mike Kennedy from Alpine made a statement which if I didn't know better I would swear came from Steve Carell's Anchorman character:


“Sometimes access to health care can be damaging and dangerous. And it’s a perspective for the [Legislative] body to consider is that, I’ve heard from National Institutes of Health and otherwise that we’re killing up to a million, a million and a half people every year in our hospitals. And it’s access to hospitals that’s killing those people.”


Oh, okay. Now I understand. Our legislature is denying people health care to save their lives. That's very noble of them. As long as we're going in that direction, let's take seat belts out of cars, because one time my Uncle got in car accident and was actually saved by not wearing his seat belt. And actually, why don't we eliminate marriage? Sometime marriage leads to divorce.


Joking aside, the flaws in Kennedy's reasoning here are patently obvious. Even if Kennedy were siting actual, credible evidence and numbers rather than what amounts to little more than vague anecdotal speculation, his number of "up to a million" fails to recognize that, according to a report by the American Hospital Association, 133 million people per year are treated in emergency rooms alone. So, if we were to go by that figure, less than one percent of the people treated in Emergency Rooms encounter these sorts of accidents. LESS THAN ONE PERCENT. And that doesn't even take into account the fact that  a 2013 study sited in The Journal of Patient Safety puts the number of people harmed by medical errors to be between 210,000 and 440,000, which even I as a mathematically challenged person know is way less than a million.


Dr. Kyle Jones, who was speaking in favor of Healthy Utah, offered this response to Kennedy:


 “There are millions more that are helped by that. It’s important to keep in mind that while there are risks it’s important to keep in mind that the benefits outweigh them.”


When I went through my kidney transplant ordeal, I was very well educated on the risks involved. Ever person I've met who suffers from serious illness is aware of these risks. We also know that going without care more or less guarantees we'll die. So, Rep/ Kennedy, with all due respect, thanks for looking out for us, but we'll go ahead and take the risk of seeing a doctor.