{"id":1816,"date":"2010-03-04T10:51:12","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T14:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1816"},"modified":"2010-03-04T10:51:12","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T14:51:12","slug":"every-24-minutes-why-its-time-to-vote-on-the-health-care-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1816","title":{"rendered":"Every 24 minutes: why it&#8217;s time to vote on the health care bill"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two years ago, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.urban.org\/health_policy\/about\/dorn.cfm?page=1\">friend I&#8217;ve known for more than 40 years<\/a> who works at the Urban Institute <a href=\"http:\/\/www.urban.org\/UploadedPDF\/411588_uninsured_dying.pdf\">updated the Institute of Medicine&#8217;s<\/a> estimate of the annual excess deaths in the U.S. due to lack of insurance. In 2008, the updated estimate was 22,000 annual excess deaths. That&#8217;s an average of one preventable death about every 24 minutes.<\/p>\n<p>Every time that a Republican talks about &#8220;starting over,&#8221; think of how many 24-minute chunks of time that would involve. Every 24 minutes of delay = one more excess death. Every time that an overly-righteous proponent of the public option <a href=\"http:\/\/yglesias.thinkprogress.org\/archives\/2010\/03\/defections-from-the-left.php\">talks about<\/a> &#8220;being slapped in the face by the White House&#8221; and (again) starting the debate over, think of how many 24-minute chunks that would involve. Think of how many 24-minute chunks have passed since 1993 (the last time a major health-care initiative died).&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s time for the Senate to vote on amendments to its bill using reconciliation, and it&#8217;s time for the House to pass both the Senate bill and amendments.<\/p>\n<p><b>Updated<\/b>: Families USA <a href=\"http:\/\/www.familiesusa.org\/resources\/newsroom\/press-releases\/2010-press-releases\/failure-to-adopt-health-3.html\">has calculated<\/a> that it&#8217;s now a preventable death every 21 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two years ago, a friend I&#8217;ve known for more than 40 years who works at the Urban Institute updated the Institute of Medicine&#8217;s estimate of the annual excess deaths in the U.S. due to lack of insurance. In 2008, the updated estimate was 22,000 annual excess deaths. That&#8217;s an average of one preventable death about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-comments","category-union"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-ti","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}