June 25, 2017

How deadly is lack of health insurance?

Guardian -  The Congressional Budget Office , a nonpartisan federal agency, estimated last month that 23 million people would lose their health insurance over the next decade if the Republican bill that passed the House made it into law. The CBO is yet to score the Senate version.

Various studies have looked at whether uninsured people have a higher risk of death. The most cited was published by the American Journal of Public Health in 2009 and found that nearly 45,000 Americans die each year as a direct result of being uninsured.

In [a] Harvard study, the researchers had 9,000 people in their dataset – enough that they were able to ensure they were really measuring the impact of a lack of health insurance.

The researchers found that a lack of health insurance had a mortality hazard ratio of 1.40. In other words, they concluded that Americans without health insurance were 40% more likely to die than those with it, even after taking into account the individual’s “gender, age, race/ethnicity, poverty income ratio, education, unemployment, smoking, regular alcohol use, self-rated health, physician-rated health and body mass index”.

The researchers calculated that in 2005, lack of health insurance resulted in 44,789 deaths of Americans age 18 to 64.

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