Study: Gun-related injuries cost $2.8 billion per year in hospital charges

By Andrew Shepperson

Gun-related injuries are costing the American people billions of dollars per year in hospital charges, a new study has found.
For the study, published in the October issue of Health Affairs, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine used data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample to identify 150,930 patients, which represented a weighted total of 704,916 patients nationwide, who were treated for firearms-related injuries in the emergency department between 2006 and 2014.
The researchers found that the average emergency room and inpatient charges were respectively $5,254 and $95,887, resulting in approximately $2.8 billion in such charges per year for the group studied. Approximately 37 percent of the patients who reported alive to the emergency room were admitted to inpatient care, and around 8 percent died during their hospital visit.
Over half of patients in the study sample were uninsured or self-paying, the researchers noted. This means patients either had to pay the full amount of actual hospital charges or that the charges went unrecovered and increased the overall amount of uncompensated care provided by health care professionals.
Men were nine times more likely to suffer firearms-related injuries than women and made up approximately 89 percent of the patients studied. Such injuries were most common among men ages 20-24, and

Source: Guns.com