Putting a price tag on gun violence
19th January 2016 · 0 Comments
By Della Hasselle
Contributing Writer
Just days before President Barack Obama made an emotional speech calling for more restrictive background checks for firearm purchases, the New Orleans Police Department announced the local homicide rate had reached a three-year-high.
There were 165 murders in New Orleans last year, compared to 150 in 2014 and 155 the year before that, police said. Most of the homicide victims died from gunshot wounds.
New Orleans has long struggled with gun violence, as the city has ranked first nationally in murders per capita 11 times since 1985. One study shows the murder rate in 2008 was higher than that of Baghdad, Iraq.
Calculating the human toll of the gun violence problem might be impossible, according local orthopedic surgeon Dr. Russell Russo. But after six years of research, Russo was able to quantify the financial impact of gun violence for at least one hospital in New Orleans.
In a medical study published Jan. 5, Russo said the now-shuttered LSU Interim Hospital saw 3,500 gunshot wound patients from 2007 to 2013.
Ultimately, that violence cost the hospital close to $40 million in that time period, he found, since only about six percent of the victims who were studied had some form of insurance. Most victims, he added, were unable to pay for the care they received.
Russo has been a practicing orthopedic surgeon for six years, according to his medical profile. After graduating from LSU medical school, he now practices at several hospitals throughout the area, including East Jefferson General Hospital Omega Hospital.
It was during his training at the old University Hospital, however, where Russo began gathering data on the costs of gun-related injuries. He studied the issue for six years.
“We looked at CMS data, the operating cost to charge ratio, and found that it cost about $73 million to treat, not what was billed, but to treat, and we only took in $31 million, and these are the facts LSU gave me,” Russo told the television station WDSU during an interview about the report.
Of the roughly 3,600 patients treated, the total amount billed by the hospital over the study period was nearly $142 million, Russo said.
Included in the study were patients with a diagnosis of an acute gunshot wound when they were brought to the emergency room, according to the report, but not patients with complications from a previous gunshot wound.
Nonfatal gunshot injuries cost a “significant amount of money to treat” because the resulting injuries require the services of a wide range of medical and surgical specialties, Russo said in his published study.
Of the patients counted in the study, 59 percent required orthopedic consultation and 25 percent required inpatient orthopedic surgical intervention. Overall, acute gunshot wounds accounted for 23 percent of orthopedic trauma consultations.
The problem isn’t limited to New Orleans. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are 11,000 gun-related homicides and 19,000 gun-related suicides each year in the United States, making the country highest among industrialized nations in firearm-related deaths.
And after a significant decrease from 1993–2007, nonfatal firearm-related incidents have been steadily increasing. About 84,000 nonfatal gunshot injuries occur per year in the U.S.
Overall, in the U.S., nonfatal gunshot incidents are estimated to cost $88 billion dollars over 5 years from hospital admissions and lost productivity, Russo estimated – an amount he said was “significantly higher” than a similar study done in 1987, estimating the cost to be only $4 billion annually.
Hospitals aren’t the only ones that bear the burden. A 2015 report released by Mother Jones found that, when estimating conservatively, American taxpayers pay roughly $12.8 million every day to cover the costs of gun-related deaths and injuries.
Altogether, that comes to more than $229 billion a year.
The news organization found that taxpayers cover roughly 87 percent of total costs of gun violence in America, from the time a gunshot victim is brought to the hospital to the day a convicted shooter is released from prison.
The largest expense incurred by gun violence – long-term prison costs – runs an annual $5.2 billion tab for the government and taxpayers annually, Mother Jones found.
Other costs included legal fees, long-term disability fees, mental health care, police investigations and security enhancements.
Mother Jones warns that the estimates may be low, largely due to a lack of solid data gathered by the U.S. government. The prime reason for the lack of research is that the National Rifle Association and “other influential gun rights advocates” keep shutting it down, the organization said.
“A top public health expert describes the chill this way: ‘Do you want to do gun research? Because you’re going to get attacked. No one is attacking us when we do heart disease,’” the authors wrote.
In his report, Russo agrees that very little research has been done to assess costs of violence. He said the data is important, however, because the financial impact of this violence has direct impact on how hospitals should train new doctors in the future.
“With health care costs expected to steadily increase over the next 10 years, an accurate depiction of the medical costs borne by gunshot violence is vital to understanding the financial impact of this preventable problem,” Russo said. “With increasing work hour restrictions on surgical residencies, resident training must become more efficient.”
