Study: 17,000 Children Died Because They Lacked Health Insurance

Baltimore, MD (AHN) – Researchers from John Hopkins Children’s Center say lack of health insurance might have led or contributed to nearly 17,000 deaths among hospitalized children in the United States over the last twenty years.

The study is one of the largest ever to look at the impact of insurance on the number of preventable deaths and the potential for saved lives among sick children in the United States. The research team used more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005, and compared the risk of death in children with insurance and in those without. Researchers found that uninsured children in the study were 60 percent more likely to die in the hospital than those with insurance.

When comparing death rates by underlying disease, the uninsured appeared to have increased risk of dying independent regardless of their medical condition, the study found.

However, the findings only capture deaths during hospitalization. Researchers did not calculate or analyze deaths after discharge from the hospital, nor did they count children who died without ever being hospitalized. So the real casualty rate could be far higher than the 17,000 deaths published. “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,” says lead investigator Fizan Abdullah, M.D., Ph.D., pediatric surgeon at Hopkins Children’s Center.

Another researcher who worked on the study, David Chang, Ph.D. M.P.H. M.B.A. believes that he and his colleagues can’t say with absolute certainty the 17,000 children would have been saved. But, does say, “The point here is that a substantial number of children may be saved by health coverage.”

Currently more than 7 million American children in the United States remain uninsured amid the current health-care reform debate.

Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., director of Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins and medical director of the Center for Innovations in Quality Patient Care says, “In a country as wealthy as ours, the need to provide health insurance to the millions of children who lack it is a moral, not an economic issue.”

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