GUNS COST AMERICANS $2.8 BILLION PER YEAR IN HOSPITAL CARE TO TREAT WOUNDS
[div class="excerFaiz Gani, Joseph Sakran and Joseph Canner of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine collected numbers representing more than 704,000 people who visited hospitals to treat gunshot wounds between 2006 and 2014. They crunched data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, which is the largest all-payer emergency department (ED) database. The emergency department cost averaged $5,254 per patient and the subsequent inpatient charges totaled nearly $96,000 on average per patient
The doctors only considered gunshot victims who arrived alive at an emergency room for treatment—people who never sought treatment or died on the way were not counted. Since the data was collected between 2006 and 2014, it also doesn’t include data from mass shootings since then, such as the ones in San Bernardino, Orlando, or, most recently and fatally, Las Vegas.
The data confirmed several important facts about gun violence. For every female gun violence patient hospitals treated, nine male patients were treated. About half of patients were between the ages of 18 and 29. More than half of the patients were uninsured or self-paying, meaning that they would either have to pay economically crippling fees, or the hospital would go unpaid. Despite treatment, about 8% of those treated died in the emergency room.
The nearly $3 billion in annual treatment costs says little of the financial, practical, and emotional costs of the gun deaths, which total around 34,000 people per year. The actual expense extends far beyond the hospital. “This doesn’t include the economic costs from the standpoint of productivity to society, legal fees, all those other things that aren’t really included in this aspect,” said Sakran, who directs emergency general surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Mother Jones reported in 2015 that number as around $229 billion, an amount that would include lost wages, physical therapy, security costs, police and criminal investigation costs, funerals, and other sad expenses brought on by firearms in the US.
http://www.newsweek.com/gun-violence-shootings-costs-billions-healthcare-spending-treat-wounds-676180
= new reply since forum marked as read
i've heard (from NRA spokesperson) that feet are just as capable of killing people as guns so we need to regulate them too.
those seam cuts from the Swoosh label on shoes... instant unclotting lacerations. thousands of innocents are bleeding out every year just from tying their shoes!
<-- because these days, who really knows?
Miller’s approach looks at two categories of costs. The first is direct: Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations, and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs. About 87 percent of these costs fall on taxpayers. The second category consists of indirect costs: Factors here include lost income, losses to employers, and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death.
In collaboration with Miller, Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion. Direct costs account for $8.6 billion—including long-term prison costs for people who commit assault and homicide using guns, which at $5.2 billion a year is the largest direct expense. Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence, in other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.
Indirect costs amount to at least $221 billion, about $169 billion of which comes from what researchers consider to be the impact on victims’ quality of life. Victims’ lost wages, which account for $49 billion annually, are the other major factor. Miller’s calculation for indirect costs, based on jury awards, values the average “statistical life” harmed by gun violence at about $6.2 million. That’s toward the lower end of the range for this analytical method, which is used widely by industry and government. (The EPA, for example, currently values a statistical life at $7.9 million, and the DOT uses $9.2 million.)
Our investigation also begins to illuminate the economic toll for individual states. Louisiana has the highest gun homicide rate in the nation, with costs per capita of more than $1,300. Wyoming has a small population but the highest overall rate of gun deaths—including the nation’s highest suicide rate—with costs working out to about $1,400 per resident. Among the four most populous states, the costs per capita in the gun rights strongholds of Florida and Texas outpace those in more strictly regulated California and New York. Hawaii and Massachusetts, with their relatively low gun ownership rates and tight gun laws, have the lowest gun death rates, and costs per capita roughly a fifth as much as those of the states that pay the most.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america/
