A new study of hospital records by the Johns Hopkins Children's Center has found that uninsured children were 60 percent more likely to die after being admitted to the nation's hospitals than were children with health care insurance. The study's lead author, pediatric surgeon Fizan Abdullah, says they examined medical records from 1988 to 2005 in 37 states and learned that nearly 1,000 more uninsured children died each year compared to children who had insurance.

"Analyzing the hospitalizations of 23 million children over the 18 years, children who did not have insurance were 1.6 times as likely to die as children who were insured, during the period of the study."

Republican members of Congress have questioned past studies that showed higher death rates among the uninsured, and have attacked health care reforms as creeping socialism.

Abdullah says the study likely under-reports the problem, because it does not include children who became insured by Medicaid or S-CHIP after being admitted to the hospital.

"If you run the simulation utilizing that definition, then in fact 39,000 children over the 18-year period of the study could have done significantly better or been saved."

Abdullah says hospital records suggest that the difference might be explained by the same issues that also affect adults without insurance: less preventive care and delays in seeing a doctor until a medical problem becomes a crisis.

"Although these are in-hospital data, the impact of not being insured occurred prior to the hospital stay. These patients delayed entering the health care system because of financial reasons."

According to a study earlier this year from the Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, one in five uninsured Pennsylvanians is under the age of 19.

The study can be obtained from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center communications office, 410-516-4996, or online at www.hopkinschildrens.org.

Tom Joseph, Public News Service - PA