Matt Yglesias also doesn’t think it’s worth $50 to find out what the column says. Good decision as it includes this.
Paul Krugman uses his first day behind the Times Select barrier to provide us with this little gem:
Lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than Katrina and 9/11 combined.
(Courtesy of a buddy with Lexis Nexis.)
Some 3,500 deaths from both catastrophes together is roughly the current estimate is it not? No, I have no idea whether lack of health insurance causes that many deaths each year or not and as Krugman doesn’t provide any source it’s a little difficult to check. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it were true though.
However, just to be obnoxious, let’s look at a different number, that for iatrogenic mortality.
Drugintel thinks that’s about 39,000 via error and a further 106,000 via adverse drug reactions.
Wrong Diagnosis has some slightly different numbers:
Nevertheless,
bearing in mind that about 2.5 million deaths occur annually in the USA,
here are some of the statistics and death rate estimates from various reports:
- 42% of people believed they had personally experienced a medical mistake (NPSF survey)
- 44,000 to 98,000 deaths annually from medical errors (Institute of Medicine)
- 225,000 deaths annually from medical errors including 106,000 deaths due to "nonerror adverse events of medications" (Starfield)
- 180,000 deaths annually from medication errors and adverse reactions (Holland)
- 20,000 annually to 88,000 deaths annually from nosocomial infections
- 2.9 to 3.7 percent of hospitalizations leading to adverse medication reactions
- 7,391 deaths resulted from medication errors (Institute of Medicine)
- 2.4 to 3.6 percent of hospital admissions were due to (prescription) medication events (Australian study)
Various studies have been performed about medical errors.
A phone survey by the National Patient Safety Foundation
found that 42% of people believed they had experienced
a medical error personally or to a relative or friend.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports on two studies
estimating the hospital deaths due to medical errors
at 44,000 to 98,000 annually,
which would place medical errors in the top ten causes of death
in the USA.
Barbara Starfield’s article in JAMA places the estimates even higher,
citing a total of 225,000 deaths due to iatrogenic causes,
which would place health-caused deaths as the 3rd leading
cause of death in the USA.
Holland et al (1997) estimates as many as
1 million patients are injured while in the hospital
and approximately 180,000 die as a result,
with the majority due to medication adverse reactions.
So we’ve got a bit of a spread there, 40,000 odd to a quarter million or so. As Krugman clearly implies, lack of health insurance means no treatment (and thus death). But what have we found? That health care, that thing you only get with insurance, kills huge numbers of people!
Which means that it is equally accurate to state that health insurance kills 10 to 60 times more Americans each year than Katrina and 9/11 combined.
(Yes, I know this is silly, it’s a response to the rhetoric, nothing more.)
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