Serious injuries worse for uninsured, By Henry L. Davis, July 26, 2010, Buffalo News: “Federal law prohibits hospitals from treating uninsured trauma patients any differently than patients with insurance. Yet studies in recent years have exposed a big disparity: Patients who lack insurance are much more likely to die from car accidents, gunshot wounds and other serious injuries than those who arrive at the hospital with coverage. The latest research comes from a University at Buffalo analysis of 191,666 patients, ages 18 to 30, who visited 649 trauma centers from 2001 to 2005 for blunt and penetrating trauma injuries. Blunt trauma includes injuries mainly from motor vehicle accidents, followed by such incidents as falls and assaults, while penetrating trauma consists mainly of gunshot wounds and, to a lesser extent, injuries from stabbings. For blunt trauma, uninsured patients were 1.8 times more likely to die, even after controlling for age, sex, race and severity of injury, according to the researchers, who presented their results recently at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine annual meeting. If patients lacked insurance, they were 2.6 times more likely to die from penetrating trauma injuries…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty