Gun shots and medical costs
Ed Sutor concludes that healthcare costs associated with guns is misleading:
1. The article claims that millions are spent treating gunshot wounds … but the sums mentioned are only 0.064% of America’s total medical costs.
2. This is a 60% decline since the last such study (1993) despite millions of new firearms entering the market annually.
3. No one would attempt a cost-benefit analysis without considering benefits (here, lives saved by defensive uses). Estimates are that medical negligence kills about 180,000 Americans annually, after all, but this hardly proves that medicine is useless or doctors should be avoided, since presumably many times that number are saved.
May 20th, 2005 at 8:58 am
They also need to put statistics like that into perspective. What is the medical costs for car accidents? Boat accidents? Sports injuries? Drugs?
I’d bet that guns come in much lower than all of those.