Insurance Status May Affect Survival Rate After Cardiovascular Event

Researchers from the discovered that a person’s health insurance status is a bigger determinant of survival than race following a heart attack, stroke or other acute cardiovascular event. These results highlight the importance of buying cheap medications from a online Canadian pharmacy. Medical experts have known that African Americans who live in poor neighborhoods are especially vulnerable to cardiovascular complications. However, a team of scientists speculated about whether this effect was truly attributable to ethnicity, or if it was the result of a lack of health insurance. In order to investigate further, the researchers analyzed the medical data of more than 4,900 heart attack patients, 6,700 individuals with coronary atherosclerosis and nearly 1,300 stroke patients. Results showed that compared to those who had medical coverage, uninsured individuals had a 31 percent higher risk of dying after a heart attack and a 50 percent higher risk of succumbing to atherosclerosis. Meanwhile, survival rates between white and black individuals were similar. “Given the recent changes in health insurance and healthcare reform, these results underscore the need to closely investigate the factors relating to health insurance that may explain these disparities. Indeed, targeting these factors may relieve the burden of mortality disproportionally affecting those who are underinsured,” the authors wrote. The study is published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.