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Do people with bad or no insurance simply die from HOCM?
I've read that 0.02% or 1 in 500 people on earth, or 15-20 million people, have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. If the U.S. population is around 350 million, then 7 million people in the U.S. have it more or less. Even if only a thousand people had it and 250 of them had no or bad insurance, what happens to them? I suspect they just die, like people with other deadlier conditions do where there are medical solutions that are unavailable to them. I'm fortunate but I've never seen anyone post here about those who are not.
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A couple of points, without meaning to take away from your point of the importance of having good health insurance or the potential disastrous consequences for those who don't. First, if .02% of people in the US have HCM, and the population is 350 million, then 70,000 people in the U.S. have HCM. Second, a significant percentage of people with HCM are asymptomatic, and many of those have normal life expectancies despite having HCM. That said, there are certainly thousands of people in the US (and many multiples of that in the world) who suffer a lower quality of life due to inaccessibility to HCM experts due to (1) their lack of health insurance and/or financial resourcs; and/or (2) the concentration of HCM expertise in the centers of excellence. The solutions to those problems are universal health insurance, training of physicians, providing incentives for physicians to work with underserved populations, further development of medicinal solutions that may be able to reduce the need for experienced surgeons to handle the cases that require myectomies, and training of more young surgeons to handle the cases for which medicine does not provide an adequate solution.
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2 Reactionsyes I agree. sadly none of this is likely to happen in this country...ever. A comedian once joked about the U.S. that if you were to help an elderly disabled grandmother across the street, you are a communist lol. Sad.