50 million people... yeah ok, so we are talking what 50 million invisible people, i would like you to name 10 places in the continental us that you cannot get healthcare.... waiting
About 50 million people do not have health insurance in the US. These people have problems with accessing healthcare. The following quote is from "MYTHS AS BARRIERS TO HEALTH CARE REFORM
IN THE UNITED STATES", by John P. Geyman, who is Prof Emeritus at U of Washington.
1. Everyone gets care anyhow
Purveyors of this myth assume that the uninsured and underinsured are able to access health care within an extensive safety net of community health centers; emergency rooms and outpatient clinics of public hospitals and not-for-profit community hospitals; local health departments; or other public sector clinics and hospitals, such as the Veterans Administration or National Health Service Corps. While this belief may absolve their guilt about serious access problems within the present system, it is a total misperception on many counts. Access to health care is more complex than it may appear, even for the insured. Eisenberg and Power (28) have drawn the analogy between access to health care and electrical current passing through resistanceeven for the insured, access suffers with each voltage
drop, whether their needed services are actually covered, their choice is informed and available, or primary and specialty services are available.
How should acceptable access be measured? Access to medical and surgical
services is one measure, but how about preventive care, prescription drugs,
glasses, mental health care, and dental care? Does a visit to an overwhelmed
emergency room for a nonemergent problem, or to an urgent care clinic where the physician sees 60 or more patients during a 12-hour shift without continuity (and often without access to their medical records), compensate for the lack of primary care? While the plight of the uninsured is more obvious, there are many misperceptions here as well. For example, 80 percent of the uninsured live in working families, and still cannot qualify for or afford health insurance (29). Whether insured, underinsured, or uninsured, people suffer serious outcomes of lack of access to primary care. Three examples make the point. A 1997 study of low income patients hospitalized for preventable or avoidable conditions found, for example, that 60 percent reported receiving no care before admission, while only 17 percent had been seen in an emergency room (30). A 2001 study by Baker and colleagues (31) of 7,500 adults aged 51 to 61 who lacked continuous health insurance found that almost three times as many persons experienced a decline
in their health or functional status if continuously uninsured than if insured. In
another recent study of 1,900 Medicare beneficiaries, only 4 percent without
prescription drug coverage were receiving statins, compared with an estimated 60 percent who could benefit from their use (32).