Health Care Figures No One is Talking About

I recently read Peter Singer's essay about health care. As the corporate media machine steamrolls over the truth in their drive to kill universal health insurance, here are a few figures from his article I am not hearing elsewhere:

• Health-insurance premiums have more than doubled in a decade, rising four times faster than wages.
• Health care now absorbs about one dollar in every six the nation spends, a figure that far exceeds the share spent by any other nation.
• Estimates of the number of U.S. deaths caused annually by the absence of universal health insurance go as high as 20,000.
• In one study, 43 percent of Americans with insurance reported that cost was a problem that had limited the treatment they received.
• More than 60 percent of all U.S. bankruptcies are related to illness, with many of these specifically caused by medical bills, even among those who have health insurance.
• In 2008, according to a Gallup survey, 73 percent of Canadians and 73 percent of Britons said they had confidence in their countries’ health care systems. In the United States, the figure was 56 percent.

Source: Singer, P. (2009, July 15). Why we must ration health care. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved July 20, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?ref=magazine