Similarly, a pregnant woman who lacks insurance faces a much less happy prospect than her insured counterpart. Uninsured women are 30 percent more likely than the privately insured to have their childbearing experience marred by an adverse event - more complicated deliveries, more prolonged hospital stays, newborns with greater need for neonatal intensive care, and even a higher likelihood of dying from childbirth. Uninsured people in general are more likely to be hospitalized with such serious conditions as pneumonia, malignant hypertension, bleeding ulcers, and uncontrolled diabetes. They also are more likely to require hospital care for diseases that could have been prevented entirely with immunizations or other routine care. As if that weren't bad enough, uninsured patients are also more likely to die while hospitalized than are insured patients with the same diagnoses.
Matters are worse still for children who lack health insurance.
Uninsured children are at least 70 percent more likely than insured children to go untreated when they contract a common condition like asthma. So, to be uninsured in America is, by that fact alone, to be denied anything like the full benefits of 20th century medicine. And today, over 43 million of our countrymen and women have no health insurance. That's nearly 18 percent of our non-elderly population. What's more, we are moving in the wrong direction.