Uninsured Children More Likely to Face Access and Affordability Barriers, Less Likely to Receive Preventive Care

Did you know that uninsured children are nearly 27 percentage points less likely than insured children to have received a routine checkup in the last year? That was one of the findings in a report CCF released with the Urban Institute earlier this month.

Now most Say Ahhh! readers won’t find that statistic all that surprising and may wonder why I’m blogging about it at all.  They may reason that it’s a “no-brainer” that uninsured kids are more likely than those who are insured to have health care access problems and unmet health care needs.  And they would be correct.  But commonsense isn’t enough for some and a bizarre but persistent myth that somehow being uninsured is better for your health than being covered by Medicaid continues to circulate.  My colleague Adam Searing soundly debunked that false claim in a previous blog and this new report adds to the wide body of research discrediting that bizarre myth.

The CCF/Urban Institute report on uninsured children included the following chart that illustrates the advantages of being covered.

access

The CCF/Urban Institute report found that overall, uninsured children are more likely than insured children to experience access and affordability problems and less likely to receive preventive care. Relative to insured children, uninsured children are much more likely to have had a need for health care in the previous year that was unmet because of affordability concerns and to have parents who say they have difficulty paying the child’s medical bills. Uninsured children are also much less likely to have a usual source for health care and to have received a routine checkup in the previous year, and more likely to have parents who say they lacked confidence that they can meet their child’s health care needs. For example, parents of uninsured children were 7.9 percentage points more likely than parents with insured children to report any difficulty paying their child’s medical bills in the past year.

Hopefully this new data will help put the bizarre but persistent myth to rest.

To learn more about how Medicaid and CHIP provide needed access to health services, read CCF’s fact sheet.

 

Joan Alker is the Executive Director of the Center for Children and Families and a Research Professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy.

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