If it is done right with a public option that all Americans could afford,
we could save 45,000 lives a year. This is the number of people who are dying in the US each year because they can no longer afford health care coverage.
See the link below to a Reuters news report from Sept. 2009 about a Harvard study that links
one death every twelve minutes directly to the lack of health care insurance and quality health care. According to Reuters:
The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance.
"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.