I often hear this canard from some politicians on the right:  ”Everyone has health insurance in this country – you can just go to the emergency room and get treated.”  Putting aside that it’s much more expensive to treat people in the ER for problems that a regular visit to a primary care physician could have caught early, there is a more serious consequence  for people without health insurance.  They die earlier than people who have coverage.  Decades of studies (and a little common sense) bear this out: