A study by Jack Hadley documents that people who are uninsured receive less care and have worse outcomes following an accident or the onset of a new chronic condition than those with insurance. The studybased on analysis of eight years of data and over 30,000 observationsfinds that following an accidental injury, the uninsured were less likely than the insured to receive any medical care (78.8% vs. 88.7%). Similarly, the uninsured with a new chronic condition were also less likely to receive care (81.7% vs. 91.5%). In addition, the uninsured with an injury were also twice as likely as those with insurance to have received none of the recommended follow-up care (19.3% vs 9.2%), and a similar pattern held for those with a new chronic condition (9.4% vs 4.4%). Ultimately, the study indicates that the uninsured were more likely to report not fully recovering and no longer being treated following an accident and roughly 7 months after the initial health shock, the uninsured with new chronic conditions reported worse health status than the insured with similar conditions.
Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 297, no. 10: 1073-1084 (2007)