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At seniorjournal.com, recent data on the treatment of patients with potential heart attacks reveals that alongside race and gender, a lack of affordable health insurance leads to inadequate care.

The study, based on data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Health Care Survey of Emergency Departments, and spanning 5 years, found "that race, gender and insurance differences were factors in the type of care patients received at emergency departments."

In other words, if you're not white, not male, and/or you don't have health insurance, you're not likely to get very good care. In fact, those who had some form of government subsidized health insurance were still not likely to get treatment for chest pain, one of the biggest indicators of a heart attack. In some cases, there was almost a 25% discrepancy in care; these patients were "21% less likely to be placed on cardiac monitoring, 23% less likely to have oxygen saturation measured, and more than 13% less likely to receive chest radiography than patients covered by commercial insurance."

The double bind here is at the core of the health insurance debate as it rages on in this country: if you can't afford health insurance you will either fail to get good treatment, or get treatment that you can't afford. Taxpayers often end up paying for treatment of the uninsured, which then leads to higher insurance premiums, and then even more people can't afford coverage.

Until affordable health insurance is available to all this situation simply won't go away; those people with the right amount of money (and therefore health insurance), of the right race, or the right gender, will get health care that can save their lives, while everyone else has to make do with what they can get, and hope for the best.