Mitt said the following last week:

We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack’ … No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.

You know, he’s just wrong there. Charity doesn’t pay unless the treatment is at a non-profit hospital run by that charity (Shriners, for example). The government doesn’t pay unless it’s a public hospital. People get billed for care at the emergency room, often for extraordinarily high amounts. They may not be able to pay those bills and the hospital may have to eat the cost, but they are supposed to pay. Because they can’t pay, as many hospitals know they can’t, the hospitals raise the prices for care to those who do have insurance to recover some of their losses. So we all pay more.

More than that, though, is the human cost. If you have no insurance you defer getting care until you can’t put it off any longer. You hope. You hope that that pain goes away or that aspirin will cure it. You hope that if you only take your blood pressure pills every other day that will be enough. You surely don’t get annual tests like mammographies and colonoscopies. And, as Jonathan Cohn says:

Worst case? You end up like one of those people who misses a treatable cancer until it’s too late.

And the misery doesn’t have to be physical. Universal health care is, first and foremost, a program to guarantee economic security. It exists to make sure that a chronic condition or a full-blown crisis doesn’t cripple you financially—which is what happens all the time right now, and not just to low-income Americans.

And this is the hell that Mitt and his party would like to consign some 45 million Americans to.