Poor kids' lives are only half worth saving

Say you are an emergency room nurse. Two 6 year olds come to your ER. One's been hit by a car, one thrown from a horse, both have serious head injuries. The prognosis is the same for both—except for one factor that suggests that the first kid is TWICE as likely to end up in the morgue. What is it?

One of my jobs is to comb through recent news about medical research on health status disparities and post relevant stuff on a website for the Multilingual Health Resource Exchange (www.health-exchange.net)

This is work that can become somewhat tedious, believe it or not. There are only so many times that one can feel a sense of outrage about differences in the level of kidney cancer screening between whites and asians, or about the lingering mistrust blacks feel for the health care system given our history of medical experimentation on minority patients (stop the presses!)

But the other day I read an article I found truly shocking, one that laid bare the problem with our unfair health care system. Here's what it said:

Children who lack health insurance are twice as likely to die from their injuries after being hospitalized as children who are insured. In other words, the parents have paid up their insurance premiums (along with those horseback-riding lessons, perhaps) are twice as likely to walk out of the hospital with a live kid.

This is according to a report by Families USA, in which researchers examined the records of 25,000 uninsured children with general injuries and 6,500 with traumatic brain injuries and compared them with the records of insured children. Read it yourself, for the full details.

You'll find a lot to be shocked by, but I doubt if there's much that's more shocking than the realization that the bottom line really is, for poor kids, the bottom line.