18 Illinois Adults Die Each Week In Illinois Beacause of No Health Insurance

There’s a new estimate out about the consequences of being uninsured, and it’s shocking.

In Illinois, 18 adults die each week because they lack health insurance, according to a report just released by Families USA. That adds up to 960 deaths in 2006.

These are people with conditions such as breast cancer or hypertension who delayed getting medical care because they couldn’t afford it.

Scores of studies have shown that people without health insurance have poorer access to care, which often results in worse medical outcomes, which in turn results in a greater burden of disability and death.

Of course, Families USA is an advocacy group with an agenda. It believes everyone in the U.S. should have health care coverage and that government has a part to play in making that happen.
But its latest study appears sound and consistent with other findings, according to Stan Dorn, senior research associate at the Urban Institute.

In 2002, the federal Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that 18,000 people die in the U.S. each year from health problems that were untreated or treated too late because they were uninsured.

In January, Dorn took a fresh look at the issue using new census data. He found that being uninsured raised the risk of dying for working-age adults (25 to 64) by about 25 percent—a figure confirmed by several other studies.

According to Dorn’s analysis, that means the lack of insurance contributed to as many as 137,000 to 165,000 "excess deaths" among adults in the U.S. between 2000 and 2006.
"What’s sad is, this is a problem we can solve, and every other developed country in the world has managed to provide insurance to all of its citizens," Dorn said in an interview.

The Families USA study takes Dorn’s analysis a step further by doing a state-by-state breakdown. The methodology is the essentially same as used in the reports from the Institute of Medicine and Dorn.

Advocates of health insurance expansions in Illinois were quick to seize on the new data. Of course, Gov. Rod Blagojevich has made this a signature issue and he continues to push his Illinois Covered plan despite significant resistance from the legislature.

"While the results of this study are particularly shocking, we have long been familiar with the significant challenges faced by the uninsured in Illinois," the governor said in a prepared statement. "That’s why expanding healthcare coverage to those in need has continued to be a priority."

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