Everyone Pays for the Damage Done by Guns
The medical cost of firearm violence offers one more bottom-line reason why Los Angeles business leaders need to get involved in efforts to eradicate the poverty and the lack of jobs that help to breed violence.
Cost-conscious businesses are focusing on slowing the “medical arms race” in technology that adds to their insurance premiums. But as the recent Los Angeles riots suggest, companies should also look at the costs of the arms race in ordinary, cheap guns.
Business people could benefit by confronting a paradox that doctors meet daily: It takes expensive, high-tech machines to fix people torn up by low-tech instruments of destruction.
Doctors are using $2-million machines to repair heads smashed by $35 guns--heads that often take hundreds of thousands of dollars to put back together again. Researchers are spending millions to create more non-invasive ways of attacking malignancies without scalpels or spilling blood, while the methods of the streets are getting more invasive by the day.
“The irony strikes us all,” says Dr. Rob Lufkin, an associate professor of radiology at UCLA, “that we get out of bed in the middle of the night to take care of someone, and it’s not a disease or something God did but something one human being did to another intentionally.”
Dr. Suzie El-Saden, a resident at UCLA Medical Center, sometimes explains the angiogram, a thousand-dollar procedure, to wounded gang members while she’s doing it: threading a catheter from the groin up into the artery in the neck, squirting the dye into the veins, X-raying the area to figure out which artery is spouting blood so a surgeon can tie it up. “ ‘Yeah,’ they say, ‘I know, I’ve had it before.’ ”
Like it or not, business people are helping to foot the medical bills of the uninsured, well-armed masses. And it’s not just through taxes that support the county hospitals.
Private hospitals have to charge more to patients with insurance to make up for patients who can’t pay a cent.
Employers know that if their vice president of marketing ends up in a hospital emergency room, his bill, in effect, will be inflated to pay for the guy in the next ward who wasn’t lucky enough to have a Blue Cross policy when his legs got shot off.
Even when some stranger gets shot across town, it’s Arco, Wells Fargo, Lockheed--and thousands of smaller businesses already hard-pressed to cover their own employees--that end up paying through their insurance premiums.
It’s called cost-shifting, and it’s a big concern for businesses paying premiums that are rising 20% a year or more. Last year, U.S. manufacturers spent $11.5 billion to cover the medical bills of people they don’t even know, the National Assn. of Manufacturers estimates.
It cost patients with insurance up to $380 more per person for their appendectomies or heart surgeries just to make up for uninsured victims of violent crime, the District of Columbia Hospital Assn. says.
“Cost-shifting is a heavy burden on the Los Angeles business community. The costs of caring for the uninsured is taking away from money that should be spent on schools, transportation, the whole economic infrastructure,” says Julia Thomas, co-chair of the health issues committee of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.
The medical costs citywide haven’t been definitively calculated yet. But Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital alone lost $2 million caring for the mostly uninsured victims of the riots--money the already-strapped hospital can ill afford.
And the Centers for Disease Control, which tracks epidemics--firearms as well as AIDS and flu--figured back in 1985 that the average bill for a person hospitalized with a gunshot wound was $33,000.
However you calculate it, the violence sparked by the Rodney King verdicts will end up costing millions of dollars in medical bills.
Focusing on dollars may be a grim way to look at the problem; medical bills do not reflect the losses to victims’ loved ones. But it’s one way to demonstrate that the war in the streets affects everyone--including businesses--often in ways they don’t always realize.
Guns aren’t the only source of injury and illness that send medical bills skyrocketing, but they’re easy to single out as a foolish way to drive up health care costs. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that firearm injuries cost the country $14.4 billion a year in medical costs and lost productivity.
For Los Angeles business owners staggering under mounting health insurance bills, guns go beyond the political and public health issues to an economic one.
Employers and insurers should be scrutinizing not just the high costs of medical technology, but the high cost of urban despair. It offers one more reason why it makes sense for business leaders to invest in the heart of the city.
