A new report in the Archives of Surgery, a publication of the the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), finds that Americans without health insurance are more likely to die after suffering traumatic injury than insured people are.

According to the Archives of Surgery report:

In 2007, 45.7 million Americans were uninsured… “Uninsured patients currently face health-related disparities in screening, hospital admission, treatment and outcomes,” the authors write. “Uninsured adults have a 25 percent higher risk of mortality than insured adults, accounting for approximately 18,000 deaths per year in excess. Evidence regarding the effects of lack of insurance on traumatically injured patients suggests that they are at added risk.”

Heather Rosen, M.D., M.P.H., of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues analyzed records from the National Trauma Data Bank, which contains information from 2.7 million patients admitted for traumatic injury to more than 900 U.S. trauma centers. Demographic, medical history, injury severity, outcomes and charges were assessed for 687,091 patients age 18 and older admitted between 2002 and 2006. Patients were divided into five insurance categories: uninsured, a managed care organization, commercial indemnity insurance, Medicare or Medicaid.

The uninsured had the highest rate of death across all factors — age, sex, race and severity and mechanism of injury. Even patients in the healthiest cohort — ages 18 to 30 — were more likely to die after an accident if they were uninsured.

The study’s authors suggested that the uninsured are more likely to die because they are more likely to experience delays in treatment and less likely to receive a full complement of diagnostic tests.

Source: Archives of Surgery