Caring for U.S. Victims of Gun Violence Costs $2.5 Billion in the Year After Shooting

(Bloomberg) -- Costs of caring for U.S. gunshot survivors come to about $2.5 billion in the first year after their injuries, according to a Harvard study of a topic on which research was long relatively silent because of federal funding restrictions.

Monthly direct medical costs for the gun-wounded increased from the year before the injury by almost $2,500, researchers at Harvard Medical School found. Costs for people with severe harm like brain injuries might last for years to come, said Zirui Song, an associate professor of health care policy and Massachusetts General Hospital primary-care doctor who led the study. 

Gun violence kills about 40,000 people a year, but studies of the issue were long curtailed by the Dickey Amendment, a provision in a 1996 federal spending bill that prohibited use of government funds to promote gun control. A 2019 spending bill clarified that the funds could be used to study the health impact of guns, and last year, the Government Accountability Office estimated the initial costs of firearm injury treatment at $1 billion a year. Gun control advocates hope data like this can be used to inform policies that curtail gun violence in the U.S.

Survivors of gunshots number about 85,000 annually, and the biggest increases in spending on their care occur during the first month after injuries, at about $25,000 on average, the Harvard researchers said. Survivors are also subject to less obvious trauma, with an 85% increase in substance-use disorders, a 51% increase in psychiatric disorders and a 40% increase in pain diagnoses compared to those who hadn't been shot, the research found.

Immediate family members also suffer indirectly and show increased risk of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.  

“The heightened risk for these complications among both survivors and their families should be on clinicians' radars,” Song said in a statement. 

The study, released monday by the Annals of Internal Medicine journal, analyzed medical care received and costs for about 6,500 gunshot survivors and 12,500 family members from 2008 to 2018, comparing their insurance-covered costs and out-of-pocket payment to a larger set of matched control patients. 

(Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, founded and helps fund Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for universal background checks and other gun violence prevention measures.)

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