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A U.S. study has found that one in three Americans without medical insurance is suffering from a chronic illness for which they receive inadequate treatment.Authors of a paper published in the August 05 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine say that, though the study did not link lack of health insurance and lack of access to health care, it was expected that complications would arise from such a situation."This is something that is very true in my clinical experience," said Dr. Andrew Wilper, instructor in medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, and one of the authors of the study.
Hospital Ward. Image: TahitianLime/Flickr.
"The uninsured can't get in to see the doctor, they miss medications, their blood pressure is out of control and, really, you see devastating consequences," reported LiveScience.While an estimated 47 million Americans went without health care in 2006, what has been less clear is how many of the uninsured were chronically ill?
The authors of the study used interviews of nearly 12,500 people aged between 18 and 64 -- all of whom had participated in the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES) -- to show that an estimated 11.4 million working-age Americans with at least one of seven chronic medical conditions did not have health insurance.Using the data, researchers concluded that 16.1 percent of the 7.8 million people with cardiovascular disease, 15.5 percent of the 38.2 million people with hypertension, and 16.6 percent of the 8.5 million people with diabetes were uninsured."We found some pretty striking differences when we compared uninsured individuals with one of these seven conditions with insured individuals with one of the conditions," Wilper said. "These are conditions that we take care of in the clinic. We know that we can prevent disabling complications or catastrophe if we are able to manage these conditions."
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