Lack of Health Insurance to American Children, Why A New Report Says its Serious?

Amidst the heated debate on Capitol Hill and indeed all across America about healthcare reform, a new report has just been published that indicates that a lack of health insurance may have led to the deaths of 17,000 US children across the span of two decades.

The work was spear headed by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and is one of the largest projects ever undertaken to investigate the impact of health insurance coverage on the nation’s most vulnerable citizens; sick children.

Taking data from over twenty three million hospital records that came from thirty seven different states and spanned a time period between 1988 and 2005 the researchers compared the risk of death for uninsured children with that of those whose parents had managed to secure coverage for them. With other factors such as age being equal the researchers were able to conclude that the children in the study who did not have health insurance were a full sixty percent more likely to die in hospital than their insured counterparts.

In the study a total of 104,520 patients died from amongst the 22.2 million hospitalized children who had health insurance compared to the 9, 468 uninsured children who died out of the 1.2 million included in the data. To try to estimate how many of these deaths might have been prevented by having health insurance the researchers projected the expected number of deaths based on medical condition and then applied this number to the uninsured cases. They found that in the uninsured population there were 3,535 more deaths than the statistics would have led them to expect.

The medical condition from which the patients suffered was found to make little difference, whatever ailed them the uninsured children were still more likely to never leave the hospital alive. The study only took hospitalized children into account, meaning that deaths after hospital discharge or amongst those who never made it to a hospital at all could push the numbers even higher.

According to the lead investigator on the study Fizan Abdullah, M.D., Ph.D, who is a pediatric surgeon at Hopkins Children’s, the findings are clear "If you are a child without insurance, if you're seriously ill and end up in the hospital, you are 60 percent more likely to die than the sick child in the next room who has insurance," he states simply.

The Hopkins researchers do caution that because their work only examined hospital records after death had occurred they cannot establish direct cause and effect between a lack of health insurance and a child’s risk of dying. However because of the sheer volume of the medical reports they had access to and the researchers’ ability to adjust for factors that may have otherwise clouded their results they all still feel that their work has uncovered a powerful link between the risk of a child dying while in hospital and a lack of adequate health insurance.