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Most people are aware that the inability to find affordable health insurance has a negative impact on adults - if you get sick and you don't have coverage, you're more likely to die. Period.

However, few realized how the lack of family health insurance was affecting kids. At least, we weren't all that aware until just recently, when a study published by John's Hopkins made it all too clear.

Released at WebMD's children's page, the study finds that "nearly 17,000 deaths of hospitalized children might have been prevented" if they had access to a good family health insurance plan throughout their youth.

While the specifics of how and why these kids are more likely to die aren't laid out in the article, the doctors behind the study make it clear that this finding mirrors that related to adults. In other words, it's a very sad finding, but not one that is very surprising.

With fewer and fewer employers able to offer individual coverage, let alone family health insurance, parents are finding it more difficult today to get coverage for their kids.

And kids without medical coverage don't get important checkups, or necessary vaccinations.

So while the debate rages on regarding how to make affordable health insurance a reality for sick adults, it's probably even more important to remember the littlest victims of a health care system that has become too expensive and too unwieldy to protect 7 million uninsured children throughout the U.S.