Room to grow: inequities in children's health insurance coverage
- Collection:
- Health Policy and Services Research
- Author(s):
- Planalp, Colin, author Stewart, Andrea, (Of State Health Access Data Assistance Center), author
- Contributor(s):
- State Health Access Data Assistance Center (Minn.) issuing body.
- Publication:
- [Minneapolis, Minnesota] : State Health Access Data Assistance Center, September 2022
- Language(s):
- English
- Format:
- Text
- Subject(s):
- Child Healthcare Disparities -- statistics & numerical data Insurance Coverage -- statistics & numerical data Medically Uninsured -- statistics & numerical data United States
- Genre(s):
- Technical Report
- Abstract:
- Health insurance is a linchpin in the United States’ health care system. It can insulate families from deep financial strain and medical debt, as costs for health care services have grown increasingly unaffordable in recent decades. It also provides an entry point to the health care system for needed care that is much more difficult to access for people without insurance. And for children, the doorway to health care offered by insurance is uniquely important--ensuring their opportunity to develop into healthy adults by providing access to regular health screenings, routine services, vaccinations, and vital treatments when health issues are identified. Children’s health insurance coverage rates in the United States have improved since the 1990s, largely due to policy initiatives designed to provide kids with affordable health insurance options, such as the long-running Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) established twenty-five years ago. Despite some upticks in uninsured rates beginning in 2017, children tend to have substantially lower uninsured rates overall than adults. However, while overall rates remain low, disparities among select groups of children have persisted, with wide gaps in coverage found across the states and certain demographic categories. In this issue brief and companion pieces that examine rates of children’s health insurance across the nation and for all 50 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.), we examine U.S. and state-level trends in coverage with an eye toward health equity, aiming to quantify disparities across individual states and by race and ethnicity, income as measured by poverty level, citizenship status, age, and metropolitan status (i.e., urban versus rural geography). Unfortunately, various data limitations often cause challenges for quantifying issues related to health equity, especially at the state level and for smaller segments of the population. Small sample sizes can hamper researchers’ abilities to produce reliable estimates even on measures such as health insurance rates. In order to improve our ability to investigate equity in children’s coverage for important, smaller population segments at the state level, we used a data set that combined multiple years (2016- 2020) of survey responses from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). This approach offers a trade-off, such that we aren’t specifically focused on the COVID-19 pandemic-era and the associated recent changes in health insurance trends, but we are much better able to document and understand how inequities have left some children underserved by the U.S. health care system.
- Copyright:
- Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY-NC-ND license. (More information)
- Extent:
- 1 online resource (1 PDF file (7 pages))
- Illustrations:
- Illustrations
- NLM Unique ID:
- 9918487365206676 (See catalog record)
- Permanent Link:
- http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/9918487365206676