Uninsured children at greater risk for death

By Sheilah Downey

More than 7 million children in the United States lack health insurance, a statistic that means those children are 60 percent more likely to die in the hospital than those who have insurance, according to a study this week from Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

As lawmakers debate the costs of the massive health care revisions, including the 1,990 page bill introduced by House Democrats this week, researchers say children are in critical need of health care coverage regardless of the price tag.

"Thousands of children did needlessly each year because we lack a health system that provides them health insurance. This should not be," said study co-investigator  Dr. Peter Pronovost, director of Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins.

"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."

Lack of health insurance might have lead or contributed to the deaths of nearly 17,000 children, researchers said.

In the study, researchers looked at 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1998 and 2005, comparing the risk of death to those with insurance and those without.

Those uninsured were 60 percent more likely to die, regardless of their medical condition, said researchers. The findings only looked at deaths during hospitalization and do not reflect those who may have died after leaving the hospital or those who died without being hospitalized.

The real death toll when considering those factors could even be higher, stated the Johns Hopkins release.

Dr. David Chang, co-investigator of the study, said it was impossible to say if those 17,000 children could have been saved if they had health insurance.

"The point here is that a substantial number of children may be saved by health coverage," he said. "From a scientific perspective, we are confident in our finding that thousands of children likely did die because they lacked insurance or because of factors directly related to lack of insurance."

The study was published Oct. 30 in the Journal of Public Health and was funded by the Robert Garrett Fund for the Treatment of Children.

Co-investigators for the study included Yiyi Zhang, M.H.S., Thomas Lardaro, B.S., Marissa Black, Dr. Paul Colombani and Dr. Kristin Chrouser.