Going by the disquieting findings by the researchers at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Children's Center, the 1988 to 2005 period witnessed as many as 17,000 deaths of uninsured US children.

For their report, to be published in the October 30 edition of the Journal of Public Health, the researchers referred to the over 23 million 1998-2005 hospital records from 37 states; and compared the risk of death in children who had health insurance coverage and those who did not.

The researchers highlighted that there was a 60 percent more chance of death in children who lack health insurance, vis-à-vis the insured ones. Even after making allowances for factors like race and gender, the uninsured children still faced a 37.8 percent risk of preventable deaths as compared to their insured counterparts.

The researchers also specified that the mentioned number of deaths in children included only those that occurred during hospitalization. They neither reflect the deaths that took place after discharge from the hospital, nor do they take into account those children who died without being hospitalized. As such, the researchers opined that the actual number of deaths in uninsured children might be higher that the reported figure.

Commenting on the findings, the study's co-author David Chang, said that while the report does not suggest that all the 17,000 uninsured children would have survived if they had insurance cover, "a substantial number" of them could have been saved.