A new report has found that gun violence costs the United States upwards of $1 billion yearly in medical bills, on top of the immeasurable toll it takes on victims and their families.
The report was released on Wednesday by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee. The figure in the report represents the initial health costs of hospital care for people who are shot.
Its release came before Wednesday's hearing on the economic impact of gun violence. During the hearing, several experts spoke, including Dr. Chethan Sathya, who works as a pediatric trauma surgeon in New York City.
Sathya shared that when it comes to who is responsible for the bill, victims of gun violence and their families are often stuck paying, and it isn't cheap.
"Treating gunshot injuries is way more expensive than any other type of injury," Sathya said. "A bullet wound versus a stab wound, versus a car accident. It's just devastating, the amount of damage that one bullet causes, especially in a child whose organs are all next to each other, very close to one another, cannot be described."
Medical costs for those who were victims of fatal firearm injuries in 2020 totaled $290 million, with an average cost of $9,000 per patient, according to the figures from the CDC. The data also showed that in these instances, much of the cost was paid for by public health insurance providers like Medicaid, according to the panel.
The panel cited a study from the Government Accountability Office in its report, which found that there are 30,000 initial in-patient hospital stays and 50,000 ER visits every year from firearm-related injuries.
Looking at the economic impacts of those stays, the treatment costs for in-patient hospital stays average $31,000, and the ER visits average $1,500 a piece, the report said.
The committee shared several other glaring statistics it found through its research, including stats that show more than 300 Americans are shot every day in the U.S., and 110 are killed.
Those who survive being shot spend an average of $25,000 in the first month on health care bills and then an average of nearly $2,500 a month for a full year after the injury, according to the committee.
Lastly, the committee found that gun violence also has an enormous strain on school budgets, adding more than $3 billion in annual costs for things like increased security to mass shootings.
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