LACK OF HEALTHCARE 14 TIMES AS DEADLY TO VETS AS FIGHTING IN AFGHANISTAN

New America Media - Lack of health insurance claimed the lives of more than 2,266 veterans under the age of 65 last year, says a Harvard Medical School study.

That number is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and twice as many (911 as of Oct. 31) as have died since the war began in 2003.

"Uninsured veterans are a stain on America's flag," asserted Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, one of the study's three researchers and professor of medicine at the school. "It's particularly striking that a combat veteran who has already served his country is denied [adequate] health care."

The Harvard researchers said that health care reform legislation pending in the House and Senate would not "significantly affect this grim picture."

Only a minority of veterans – those disabled by military service – is automatically eligible for VA care.

Vets who have a combat-related injury and are 100 percent disabled can get full care from the VA, said Allan Campbell, a veteran of the Vietnam war. Campbell said he had to "fight for years and years before he could go from 10 percent care to 100 percent care.". . .

Woolhandler said researchers analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau's March 2009 Current Population Survey, which queried Americans about their insurance coverage and veteran status.

The survey found that 1,461,615 veterans between the ages of 18 and 64 were uninsured -- that is, they neither had health insurance nor received ongoing care at Veterans Health Administration hospitals or clinics -- in 2008.

Their research found that being uninsured raises an individual's odds of dying by 40 percent, causing 44,798 deaths in the United States annually among those aged 17 to 64. With that data, Woolhandler and her colleagues arrived at their estimate of 2,266 preventable deaths of non-elderly veterans in 2008.