By Liane Wong, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
Just over a week ago, data released from the Urban Institute gave all parents a milestone to celebrate. Since 1997, the share of uninsured children declined by 75% and for the first time in history, 95 percent of the nation’s children have health insurance.
For our youngest children, many being raised in single parent households, the news is even better. As of December 2015, 97 percent of our youngest children ages 0 to 5 have health insurance and as a result are getting better access to preventative and primary care, dental, vision and behavioral health care services in the crucial window of time when their brains are developing at an exponential rate.
As indicated in this infographic, nine of the states in which the Packard Foundation has funded children’s advocacy organizations since 2007 have now achieved a 95 percent or better coverage rate for children ages 0 to 18. With economic and fiscal conditions in flux for much of the last decade, the role federal and state leaders, public agencies and advocates have played to narrow this gap is worth shouting from the rooftops.
Good health in early childhood is an essential component of school readiness. And a growing body of evidence links comprehensive health coverage, such as that provided by Medicaid and CHIP, to lifetime learning, including a higher likelihood a covered child will graduate from high school and pursue post-secondary education. Children with health coverage also have better health outcomes and increased earnings later in adulthood when compared with children who lack access to health coverage in the early years.
Children also need healthy parents. With these historic gains for children, the Foundation was keenly interested in learning more about the parents and the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in their lives. Prior to 2015, scarce research existed on the ACA’s effect on parent coverage and in particular for the millions of mothers living with dependent children. Ground-breaking data released this week sheds light on how mothers’ coverage improved over just one year into the ACA’s full implementation – with their uninsured rates falling 3.8 percentage points between 2013 and 2014 – a decline nearly three times as large as any prior year-to-year change since 1997. This change accounts for nearly 1.6 million mothers across the United States who gained coverage between 2013 and 2014, with a large proportion of them with incomes at or below $27,800 for a family of three.
We know that healthy moms are more likely to have insured children and take them to the doctor and dentist, and are more able to provide and care for their children. Families, schools, workplaces and communities stand to broadly benefit when parents are healthy and free from the stress of not getting care when they need it.
Despite these gains, researchers found that still nearly one in six mothers remained uninsured. Uninsured mothers are more likely to be young, low-income, noncitizens, unmarried, less educated and living in the South. So while we joyfully celebrate our mothers this weekend, let’s not forget those who lack affordable health coverage. This is an important and developing two generation (parents and children together) story with far-reaching implications for our nation’s families and communities.
