A new Harvard Medical School study estimates that 45,000 people die each year due to lack of access to health insurance (HT TPM):

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday. "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.

That access to health care is so clearly a life issue is just part of why the opposition to health reform from some pro-life quarters is so hard for me to understand. The other reason I am confused by their position is that I don't completely understand the anxiety that subsidies for insurance will facilitate people getting abortions. Obama is willing, as I understand it, to mandate that insurers receiving subsidies pay for abortions only out of revenue received from individual premiums. The counter-argument I've heard is that this distinction is just a gimmick. Since the newly insured wouldn't have been able to afford coverage without the federal subsidy, any time they use their subsidized insurance to procure an abortion, it's as if the federal government's subsidies were the cause of the abortion.There are a couple of aspects of the argument that confuse me. First, surely some of the uninsured surely get abortions today, through services provided by nonprofit groups like Planned Parenthood. So we're really talking about some increment of the uninsured -- those who would not be able to afford to get an abortion today but who would get one if they had access to subsidized insurance. How many people are we talking about? More than the 45,000 people who die each year because of the lack of access to health care?But more broadly, wouldn't this abortion-facilitating argument be equally true for any government subsidy of the poor? How, for example, is it different from saying that we should not give the poor food stamps because (for some undetermined number of people) that will free up money from their personal budgets that they will then use to go out and procure an abortion that they otherwise would not have been able to afford? Should we require food-stamp recipients to sign some pledge that they won't use their private money to procure abortions? Given the various positions that Obama has taken to try to defuse the abortion issue in the health care context, that it may nonetheless indirectly subsidize abortions strikes me as a very odd argument against Catholics supporting health care reform.

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