Gun Violence Costs U.S. Health Care System, Taxpayers Billions Each Year [View all]

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Source: Huffington Post



The bullet exploded like a fragment from the past, piercing his present and laying waste to the future he envisioned. It tore through Jerome Graham’s back, wrecked his spleen, damaged his pancreas and kidney, and left him paralyzed from the waist down.

And while the direct medical consequences of that gunshot fired a year ago in East Baltimore end there, the full force of its destruction has reverberated more broadly, encompassing Graham’s friends, his family, his community. It has carried into the American health care system, while confronting American taxpayers with costs reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Before he was shot last year, Graham, 33, supported his wife and three children by working as an electrician. Barring a medical miracle, he will never walk again, greatly complicating his ability to earn a paycheck. Since the shot went through his body, he and his family have come to rely on government programs like Medicaid, Social Security and subsidized housing.

In the American conversation, discussion of gun-related violence generally centers on the tragic loss of life or permanent injuries that result. But beneath these headline-grabbing, life-shattering facts are costs measured in vast numbers of dollars. Firearms-related deaths cost the U.S. health care system and economy $37 billion in 2005, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attempted an estimate. The cost of those who survive gun violence came to another $3.7 billion that year, according to the CDC.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/28/gun-violence-costs-health-care_n_2965248.html