A new report from the National Academies' Institute of Medicine concludes that Americans without insurance have poorer health and are more likely to die prematurely than people with insurance.
Providing health insurance to the uninsured could improve their health and extend their life expectancy, the report concludes. Moreover, increased health coverage could reduce health disparities among racial and ethnic groups.
Among people with breast or colorectal cancer, there was a 50% increased risk of death if the patient did not have insurance. This increase in risk was largely attributed to delayed diagnosis because the uninsured are less likely to receive timely screening tests such as mammograms, Pap tests, and colorectal screening. Uninsured cancer patients often have cancers that go undetected until a fatal stage.
Lack of insurance also affected the type of treatment a cancer patient might receive. For example, uninsured women with breast cancer were less likely to receive breast-conserving surgery than women with private insurance.
"Because we don't see many people dying in the streets in this country, we assume that the uninsured manage to get the care they need, but the evidence refutes that assumption," said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Iowa Health System and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report. "The fact is that the quality and length of life are distinctly different for insured and uninsured populations."
The committee also examined the negative impact of being uninsured for people suffering from diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. A future report will look at how the lack of health insurance affects children and pregnant women.
SOURCE:
Institute of Medicine, The National Academies (http://www4nationalacademies.org)
