Study Links 45,000 U.S. Deaths to Lack of Insurance
By Susan Heavey
September 17, 2009

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.

The findings come amid a fierce debate over Democrats' efforts to reform the nation's $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry by expanding coverage and reducing healthcare costs.

President Barack Obama's has made the overhaul a top domestic policy priority, but his plan has been besieged by critics and slowed by intense political battles in Congress, with the insurance and healthcare industries fighting some parts of the plan.

The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance.

An similar study in 1993 found those without insurance had a 25 percent greater risk of death, according to the Harvard group. The Institute of Medicine later used that data in its 2002 estimate showing about 18,000 people a year died because they lacked coverage.

Part of the increased risk now is due to the growing ranks of the uninsured, Himmelstein said. Roughly 46.3 million people in the United States lacked coverage in 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last week, up from 45.7 million in 2007.

Another factor is that there are fewer places for the uninsured to get good care. Public hospitals and clinics are shuttering or scaling back across the country in cities like New Orleans, Detroit and others, he said.

Study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said the findings show that without proper care, uninsured people are more likely to die from complications associated with preventable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

Some critics called the study flawed.

The National Center for Policy Analysis, a Washington think tank that backs a free-market approach to health care, said researchers overstated the death risk and did not track how long subjects were uninsured.

Woolhandler said that while Physicians for a National Health Program supports government-backed coverage, the Harvard study's six researchers closely followed the methodology used in the 1993 study conducted by researchers in the federal government as well as the University of Rochester in New York.

The Harvard researchers analyzed data on about 9,000 patients tracked by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics through the year 2000. They excluded older Americans because those aged 65 or older are covered by the U.S. Medicare insurance program.

"For any doctor ... it's completely a no-brainer that people who can't get health care are going to die more from the kinds of things that health care is supposed to prevent," said Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=8606046


http://www.mefeedia.com/video/23645605

ABC News. Unbiased.
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If those people had insurance would it have cost more to treat them for their illness over time?

I don't think it would in the long run.

Bottom line Winx...those with insurance don't care about those without it.

Them and their families are more special than everyone else, entitlement.

Boy, is everybody in for a rude awakening.....

I have no problem with everyone having access to health insurance.
I just think they are going about it in the wrong way.
They say by stoping fraud and waste within medicare/medicade they will be able to pay for then why dont they stop that now put the money aside and see how much they are saving then work on an affordable plsn?

All it takes is one car accident, a job loss, a death in the family, a stroke, heart attack or head injury to change one's life.

Tjn,

Write the White House and your representatives and tell them what you think.

I have writen my reps. Doesnt matter you just get the same form letter in response. Makes me wonder if it was even read or just opened and responed to with the same form letter everyone gets.

I'm figuring out what to write on my first letter. I'm against the co-ops that they are talking about.

It's not as biased as Fox.

Shameless bump.