--- title: The Health Costs of Gun Violence Trauma description: Studies of hospitals costs and insurance claims show that the cost to treat gun violence trauma is billions of dollars a year. canonical: https://time.com/6181947/health-care-cost-gun-violence/ author: Emily Barone article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-05-26T18:36:52.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:35:55.514Z article:section: Health og:title: The Health Costs of Gun Violence Trauma og:description: Studies of hospitals costs and insurance claims show that the cost to treat gun violence trauma is billions of dollars a year. og:url: https://time.com/6181947/health-care-cost-gun-violence/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt222acce5419e9aa5/698a3250457a5238f2d667c5/ER-hospital.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Los Angeles Is Now Worst-Hit U.S. Metro Area For Covid-19 Cases og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Health Costs of Gun Violence Trauma twitter:description: Studies of hospitals costs and insurance claims show that the cost to treat gun violence trauma is billions of dollars a year. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt222acce5419e9aa5/698a3250457a5238f2d667c5/ER-hospital.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Health Costs of Gun Violence Trauma > Sponsored content. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=9c2865f0-c79d-4bfc-a5dc-ff9cdd076f05&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Health Costs of Gun Violence Trauma [Watch (HLS stream): The Health Costs of Gun Violence Trauma](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/sibCsZiD.m3u8) (3:44)  _Published 2022-05-31. For gun-wound survivors and their families, there’s a hefty price tag affixed to the healing process following a shooting incident, according to a Harvard Medical School study published in April that analyzed Medicare and commercial insurance claims between 2008 and 2018._ by [Emily Barone](https://time.com/author/emily-barone/) ## Emily Barone May 26, 2022 6:36 PM UTC For gun-wound survivors and their families, there’s a hefty price tag affixed to the healing process following a shooting incident, according to a Harvard Medical School study published in April that analyzed Medicare and commercial insurance claims between 2008 and 2018. by [Emily Barone](https://time.com/author/emily-barone/) ## Emily Barone May 26, 2022 6:36 PM UTC It’s impossible to quantify the cost of gun violence. There’s no way to add up pain and grief. No way to multiply that by shock and outrage. But emotional suffering and physical injuries do become real numbers when traumatic shooting events, like other public-health epidemics, contribute to the national health care burden. A 2021 [review of hospital costs](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-515) from the Government Accountability Office revealed about 33,000 inpatient stays and about 51,000 emergency room visits every year to treat firearm injuries. Those initial hospital visits were nearly triple the average patient cost, and collectively topped $1 billion annually. More than half of the cost was for patients with Medicaid and other public coverage. For gun-wound survivors and their families, there’s a hefty price tag affixed to the healing process following a shooting incident, according to a [Harvard Medical School study](https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-2812) published in April that analyzed Medicare and commercial insurance claims between 2008 and 2018\. Compared with their peers, gunshot survivors had a 40% increase in pain diagnoses, a 51% increase in psychiatric disorders, and an 85% increase in substance-use disorders in the aftermath of the shooting. Their family members had a 12% increase in psychiatric disorders. Among injured survivors in the study, medical spending topped $25,000 per person one month after the shooting. Over 12 months, the costs totaled about $30,000 per survivor—or approximately $2.5 billion when multiplied by the 85,000 people who survive firearm wounds every year in the U.S., the study found. The costs were linked to treating survivors’ physical injuries and also subsequent mental health conditions in the first year following the shooting. Gunshot survivors included in the study all had insurance coverage, and so didn’t pay out of pocket for all those expenses. Still, the study found that their co-pays and deductibles combined went up about $100 per month, on average, in the first year. What’s more, that financial burden didn’t account for lost productivity, wages, or employment (which could impact their ability to pay for health care), nor did it account for longer-term rehabilitation costs in later years. For survivors’ significant others, parents, and children, medical spending was nearly $80 higher per person in the first month after the injury, but not statistically different over a one-year period. However, the study didn’t account for the population of families that lost a loved one to gun violence, nor the financial hardships associated with caring for a gunshot victim. Another [analysis from Everytown Research](https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-economic-cost-of-gun-violence/), a gun safety advocacy organization, puts medical costs even higher than the Harvard study, at $3.5 billion a year, though that figure accounts for survivors’ long-term care, coroner services for fatally shot victims (of which there are some 40,000 a year), and mental-health services for family members. The Everytown analysis notes that, beyond the direct medical and health costs, the overall financial toll of gun violence on American society is hundreds of billions of dollars, including quality-of-life costs that are inherently intangible, but can be loosely estimated based on jury awards and victim settlements. In the wake of high-profile mass shootings, like the most recent [shootings at a Buffalo, N.Y. supermarket](https://time.com/6177628/buffalo-shooting-black-americans-guns/) and [a Uvalde, Texas elementary school](https://time.com/6181718/uvalde-shooting-grieving-community/), there’s often a flurry of [fundraisers to support the affected families and communities](https://time.com/6181421/how-to-help-uvalde-texas-school-shooting/). Some instances of gun violence result in remuneration following lawsuits. Such financial buffers—that is, the ones that no one ever wishes for—don’t bring down the costs that the broader health care system has to shoulder. Nor do they relieve the personal and collective sorrow that the U.S. has endured time, and time, and time again. ## Transcript [00:03] When we hear about firearm injuries or mass [00:06] shooting events, they tend to be characterized by the number of [00:09] people who died. And when there are data shown about [00:14] the worst, for example, mass shootings and U.S. [00:18] history, those are also typically described by the [00:21] number of people who died. But what's often forgotten, I [00:24] think, in those cases is the number of people who also were [00:29] hurt by firearms in those incidents, but managed to [00:33] survive and what are the health and economic consequences of [00:37] those non fatal injuries? [00:56] So in this study design, we looked at one year prior to [01:02] firearm injury through one year after firearm injury. And we [01:06] found that non-fatal firearm injuries led to a roughly four [01:11] fold increase in health care spending in the first year after [01:15] the non-fatal firearm event. This four-fold increase in [01:19] health care spending was explained by increases in every [01:22] category of health care spending we looked at including [01:26] hospitalizations, outpatient visits, prescription drugs, [01:29] labs, imaging, tests, homecare, transportation, and others. We [01:36] found that on average over the first year following a non fatal [01:39] firearm injury, survivors experienced about a $30,000 [01:44] increase in total health care spending across that year, when [01:48] we multiplied $30,000 per survivor by the roughly 85,000 [01:53] non-fatal firearm injury survivors each year in the U.S., [01:58] that came out to be about $2.5 billion in total direct [02:04] health care spending, attributable plausibly to non- [02:07] fatal firearm injuries in the first year alone. Of that $2.5 [02:11] billion in direct medical spending in the first year, [02:14] about 96% of those dollars were paid by public payers like [02:20] Medicare, private payers; like insurance plans, or employers [02:24] who are effectively self-insured with about 4% paid by patients [02:30] out of pocket. And so the vast majority of those dollars are [02:35] paid by either taxpayers one way or another or through wages [02:39] forgone from the workforce through employer health care spending. [02:53] So the number of people who are injured in a non-fatal fashion [02:58] through firearms is quite large. And I think intuitively as [03:02] members of the public when they are not talked about as much in [03:07] the coverage of these events, we tend to think that they were [03:10] okay because they survived. Every innocent life lost in [03:14] these mass shootings, is a tragedy, and remembering the [03:17] lives lost helps us honor them and submit their legacies into [03:21] our memory. At the same time, this study shows that the impact [03:25] on the many other lives injured is profound, both clinically and [03:30] economically. 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