You often hear that everyone in America gets good health care, even if they are uninsured. Sadly that's not the case. As we noted in a recent policy brief, uninsured people get diagnosed later, die sooner, and the costs get shifted to the rest of us anyway.

In Oregon, one working-age adult dies each day because he or she lacks health insurance. That's the conclusion of Families USA, which has taken national data from the Institute of Medicine and the Urban Institute and broken it down state-by-state.

We looked at the Oregon data because the state has been in the news so much recently because of its health insurance lottery. The state, which in more prosperous times was often at the forefront of health innovation, has seen the number of uninsured creep up to 600,000. The legislature has approved covering low-income families who don't qualify for Medicare or Medicaid. About 130,000 people are eligible but the state only has the money to cover 24,000 of them—and 17,000 of those slots are already full. The state decided the only fair way to fill the remaining slots is by lottery.

"We thought about other options, such as should we try to pick all of the sickest people or the kids or the people with cancer or heart disease," the state's Medicaid director Jim Edge told the New York Times. "But the Feds won't allow that, and there's just no way to guarantee the fairness of that. Why would cancer be more deserving than heart disease?"