Uninsured Cost U.S. up to $130 Billion a Year

June 17, 2003
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy loses between $65 billion and $130 billion every year when people without health insurance get sick and die early, according to a report released Tuesday.

It would cost less to simply insure the 41 million Americans who now lack health insurance, the report, from the Institute of Medicine, found.

Taking care of these people would likely only cost between $34 billion and $69 billion, the Institute, which advises the federal government on matters of health, found.

Providing sufficient health care to all Americans has been one of the hottest political topics in the United States for well over a decade, with Congress and the White House failing to successfully deal with the issue.

Two-thirds of Americans have health insurance through an employer or a family member's employer. The sick, disabled and those over 65 rely on Medicare and Medicaid, but the rest -- an estimated 18.5 percent of those between 18 and 65 -- had no coverage for all or part of the past year.

The estimates vary from 30 million to more than 70 million but the institute, one of the independent National Academies of Science, went with the most accepted figure of 41 million.

Mary Sue Coleman, co-chair of the committee that wrote the report and president of the University of Michigan, said she hoped the findings would help convince American voters that some kind of universal health coverage is vital.

"We believe absolutely that the time is right for people really to look at this issue," she told a news conference.

Former President Clinton made health insurance a centerpiece of his first term in office but the plan, widely opposed by insurers, failed.

NOT CONTRIBUTING TO SOCIETY

Children, especially suffer, the report found. "A path can be traced from lack of health insurance to a child not fulfilling his or her academic potential," it said.

Asthma affects 5 million children under 18, for example. "It accounts for between 3.6 and 11.8 lost school days every year. For children with poorly controlled asthma, absences may lead to poor performance at school."

Such children grow up to earn less and contribute less to society, the report argues.

One complaint has been that people without insurance wait until they are very ill to visit a doctor, then go straight to an emergency room. Their care costs much more than if they had done preventative maintenance with regular trips to a doctor.

Hospitals are burdened and many have closed their emergency departments as a result -- leaving entire communities without easy access to crisis care.

But many of the uninsured do not even have this option, particularly those with the main conditions that kill people in the United States, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

"It has been so easy for people to assume that if people need care they'd end up in a hospital," said Dr. James Mongan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Partners HealthCare Inc. in Boston, a panel member.

"That may be true for things like childbirth or a broken arm but it is not true of more chronic conditions."

If anything, the study underestimates the costs of not insuring 41 million Americans, Mongan said.

For example, an uninsured patient may not have his diabetes under control, and when he becomes eligible for Medicare at 65, the state-federal health insurance program will have to spend plenty to get him healthy.

"Providing health care coverage to those who lack it is likely to be a cost-effective strategy that pays not only in lives saved and better health, but also in economic dividends," said committee co-chair Dr. Arthur Kellermann, professor of emergency medicine at Emory University in Atlanta.

Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service

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