Uninsured death rates spike since 1993

By Sheilah Downey sheilahd at foodconsumer dot org

Sounding like a chapter out of "Insurance for Dummies," the essence of health insurance was summed up succinctly in a Harvard University study released on Friday.

"Health insurance can only make you better if you have access to care," said study author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor of Medicine at Harvard.

Researchers found that lack of medical coverage was related to 45,000 deaths in 2005 in the United States, greater than the number of people who die each year in car accidents.

Urging lawmakers to provide health insurance to the estimated 46 million Americans without it, Harvard researchers found that people without coverage had a 40 percent higher risk of death than those with private insurance.

"If you extend coverage, you can save lives," Woolhandler. "As health care for the insured gets better, the gap between the insured and uninsured widens."

The risk for death to the uninsured has increased since 1993, said researchers, when studies found it was 25 percent greater for those without health coverage.

Increased death risks were due to the greater difficulty the uninsured have in finding care, as hospitals have closed or cut back on services, said researchers. In a converse affect, death rates for the insured are decreasing due to improvements in medical treatments for chronic conditions like high blood pressure.

Researchers concluded that access to community health centers are "not adequate substitutes for health insurance," because people need access to hospitals and specialists for broader-based care.

A 2008 study that appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, co-written by Woolhandler, studied the reasons so many working-age Americans lack health insurance.

"The decreasing size of many U.S. companies, the increasing role of service sector jobs, and the decline in manufacturing jobs have steadily eroded employer-sponsored coverage," the study stated. "Increasing premiums discourage companies from offering coverage, discourage uptake among workers required to pay a share of premium costs, and make insurance increasingly unaffordable."

The research is being published in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health and was posted online Thursday.