TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – 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 admission to a hospital. The study’s lead researcher and author, pediatric surgeon Fizan Abdullah, says they examined a large number of medical records from 1988 to 2005.

Abdullah says that in the 37 states studied, nearly a thousand more uninsured children died each year, compared to the numbers for children who had insurance.

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

Abdullah says the study likely under-reports the problem, because it doesn’t 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 data are from in the hospital, the impact of not being insured occurred prior to the hospital, delaying entry of those patients into the health care system because of financial reasons,” he said.

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

The study is at www.hopkinschildrens.org