Lack Of Health Care Contributed To 17,000 Child Deaths
Posted on: Friday, 30 October 2009, 13:56 CDT
A study released by the Johns Hopkins Children's Center said a lack of adequate health care might have contributed to the deaths of some 17,000 U.S. children over the past two decades.
The research was compiled from more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005 and concluded that children without health insurance are far more likely to succumb to their illnesses than those with medical coverage.
Fizan Abdullah, lead writer of the study and a pediatric surgeon at Hopkins, said a seriously ill child without insurance that ends up in the hospital is 60 percent more likely to die than a sick child in the next town who has insurance.
The report, published Friday in the Journal of Public Health, said that with some seven million children in the United States currently uninsured, the problem needs to be addressed immediately.
Peter Pronovost, director of critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins, said the need to provide health care to the millions of children who lack it is a moral, not an economic, imperative.
The United States is currently embroiled in a fierce debate on increasing health care access for uninsured Americans.
The Obama administration is asking Congress to approve reforms by the end of the year in order to fulfill a key campaign pledge to provide health care to some 47 million Americans -- 15 percent of the population -- who currently do not have any medical coverage.
Obama says runaway healthcare expenditures, if unchecked, are forecast to gobble up one-fifth of U.S. gross domestic product by 2013, but his plan will cut that in half.
A key element of the White House plan includes advocating a government insurance option -– something that has been fiercely criticized by Republicans, who charge that they amount to an exorbitantly expensive government takeover of health care.
But the co-investigator of the report, Dr. David Chang, said the point of the research was that a substantial number of children might be saved by health coverage.
"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," Chang said.
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Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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