Study suggest lack of health coverage contributes to 45,000 deaths annually.

Study suggests lack of health coverage contributes to 45,000 deaths annually.The CBS Evening News (9/17, story 7, 2:20, Couric) reported, "While the debate goes on over the cost of insuring everyone, a new study reveals the cost of not doing it." Harvard investigator Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, was shown saying, "We found that 45,000 Americans are dying annually due to lack of health insurance." According to the Boston Globe (9/18, Cooney), "researchers from Cambridge Health Alliance reported yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health on a study that followed 9,005 adults under 65 years old" who took part in a national CDC survey "from 1986 through 1994. After 12 years, 351 people had died. Sixty of them were uninsured, and 291 were insured." MedPage Today (9/17, Walker) explained that the researchers adjusted for such factors as "obesity, exercise habits, alcohol use, and smoking status"; and determined that "those without insurance were 40-percent more likely to die than those with a private insurance plan." Among the other factors that increased the risk of death were "clinically verified poor health (222 percent), smoking (102 percent), being a former smoker (42 percent), and being a male (40 percent)." The New Mexico Business Weekly (9/17) pointed out that the study "disputes a previous one conducted by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which, in 2002, estimated that some 18,000 Americans between the ages of 25 and 64 died each year because of a lack of health insurance." The New York Times (9/17, Abelson) "Prescriptions" blog noted that the study attributed the increase in risk to "at least two factors. One is the greater difficulty the uninsured have today in finding care, as public hospitals have closed or cut back on services. The other is improvements in medical care for insured people with treatable chronic conditions like high blood pressure. 'As healthcare for the insured gets better, the gap between the insured and uninsured widens,' Dr. Woolhandler said." Reuters (9/18, Heavey) provides excerpts of an interview it did with co-author Dr. David Himmelstein of Harvard. In comparing the IOM study to the new Harvard study, Himmelstein attributed the increased mortality risk to the fact that the rate of uninsured has increased by approximately 2 billion since the initial study. Meanwhile, according to HealthDay (9/18, Pallarito), the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) released a statement calling the "Harvard research 'flawed.'" NCPA CEO John C. Goodman said the findings "are based on faulty methodology and the death risk is significantly overstated. The subjects were interviewed only once and the study tries to link their insurance status at that time to mortality a decade later. Yet over the period, the authors have no idea whether subjects were insured or uninsured, what kind of medical care they received, or even cause of death." Near the end of the aforementioned CBS Evening News (9/17, story 7, 2:20, Couric) clip, Goodman was shown saying, "I think you can't trust the results. Having said that, we ought to do something for the uninsured."