scholarly journals Does Publicly Provided Health Insurance Improve the Health of Low-Income Children in the United States

10.3386/w6887 ◽  
1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Kaestner ◽  
Theodore Joyce ◽  
Andrew Racine
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
Low Income Children

Health

Getting By ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 329-428
Author(s):  
Helen Hershkoff ◽  
Stephen Loffredo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Coverage ◽  
Eligibility Criteria ◽  
Insurance Program ◽  
Health Insurance Program ◽  
Child Health Insurance

This chapter addresses the issue of health care for low-income people. The United States, virtually alone among developed nations, does not offer universal access to health care, leaving many millions of individuals without health insurance or other means of obtaining necessary medical services. In 2010, Congress enacted the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—popularly known as “Obamacare”—marking an important but incomplete response to the nation’s health care crisis. This chapter examines the ACA in detail, including its impact on Medicaid and Medicare, the major government health programs in the United States, its creation of Health Insurance Exchanges and tax credits to help low-income households obtain private health coverage, and the reform of private health insurance markets through a patient’s bill of rights, which, among other measures, prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage for preexisting medical conditions. Perhaps the most critical aspect of the ACA was its expansion of Medicaid to cover virtually all low-income citizens (and certain immigrants) who do not qualify for other health coverage. Although several states opted out of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, the Medicaid program nevertheless remains the largest single provider of health coverage in the United States. This chapter also provides a detailed description of Medicaid, its eligibility criteria and scope of coverage; the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a government-funded health insurance program for children in households with too much income to qualify for Medicaid; and Medicare, the federal health insurance program for aged, blind, and disabled individuals.

E-Shopping for Health: Issues for Latinos Using the Health Insurance Marketplace

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
Georgia Beilmann ◽  
Ying-Jen Lin ◽  
Sabrina Perlman ◽  
Kimberly Ross ◽  
Michael Cavanaugh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Data Collection Strategy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racial Ethnic

Health care in the United States is undergoing a radical restructuring, mandated in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), designed to improve access to care and increase the efficiency of our health care system. Key features include a revamped health insurance market and increased reliance on electronic technologies for buying insurance and tracking patient care. One goal of these changes is to reduce the unequal burden of disease carried by low-income racial/ethnic minorities. However, the long history of racial/ethnic health disparities in the United States raises concern for how diverse populations will be affected by these innovations. Applied anthropologists are well equipped to produce knowledge and insight to inform how changes are enacted and to maximize positive impact for vulnerable populations. Employing a holistic framework and an in-depth data collection strategy, anthropologists are especially adept at uncovering the insider's perspective. This adds important insight and nuance to understandings of how the ACA's health care innovations affect specific groups.

Dentistry and Childhood Poverty in the United States

2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
HB Waldman ◽  
D Cannella ◽  
SP Perlman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dental Services ◽  
Childhood Poverty ◽  
Low Income Families ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Localized Levels

The proportion and numbers of children living in low income families and without health insurance continues to increase. The magnitude of these problems is considered at localized levels in terms of the impact on the use of dental services.

Factors Associated with Medicaid Enrollment for Low-Income Children in the United States

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chyongchiou J. Lin ◽  
Judith R. Lave ◽  
Chung-Chou H. Chang ◽  
Gary M. Marsh ◽  
Charles P. LaVallee ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
Factors Associated ◽  
Low Income Children ◽  
Medicaid Enrollment

Capitalizing on Illness: The Health Insurance Industry

1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Bodenheimer ◽  
Steven Cummings ◽  
Elizabeth Harding
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
Insurance Industry ◽  
Private Insurance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Insurance Companies ◽  
Health Insurance Industry

The private health insurance industry in the United States began as a money-collection mechanism for hospitals and doctors, and has evolved into an important profit-making sector of the economy. Blue Cross is dominated by hospital representatives and serves to channel money into the nation's hospitals. Physicians control Blue Shield and are its principal beneficiaries. And commercial insurance companies are closely linked to banks and industrial corporations through the country's large financial empires. Some effects of this elite control over the health insurance industry have been inadequate and distorted insurance coverage, discrimination against the elderly, the sick, and the poor, and rapidly rising medical costs. In addition, the control of Medicare and Medicaid by private insurance institutions has contributed to the enormous inflation produced by these programs. Though governments, consumers, and even the insurance industry itself are beginning to apply controls to the unprecedented medical inflation of the late 1960s, these controls tend to limit access to health care, especially for low-income people. Unless insurance companies are barred from the health care field and a public financing mechanism based on progressive taxation is introduced, health care will never be an equal right for everyone in the United States.

Adjustment: 1920–1954

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Albjerg Graham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Low Income ◽  
School Environment ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Low Income Children ◽  
Teapot Dome ◽  
The World ◽  
Soviet Russia

World War I, according to President Woodrow Wilson and other sloganeers, made “the world safe for democracy.” Americans were largely spared the cataclysmic effects of the Great War endured by Europeans. Nonetheless, the national mood in the United States changed dramatically, and, as is so often the case, this shift in sentiments could be clearly discerned in new priorities for the school system, initially for children of welleducated and wealthy parents. Pundits proclaimed that assimilation had been achieved, although the practices associated with it faded only gradually over the next two decades and particularly persisted in schools serving immigrant and other low-income children. America in the 1920s experienced a period of growing wealth, considerable corporate and governmentally ignored greed, widespread racial and religious bigotry, and rapidly changing social mores, particularly for urbanites. In such a period, discussions about the national need for assimilation as a means of preserving the democracy seemed out of place. With so much change in the air, “adjustment” to the new times emerged as the new catchword. Many of the most salient events and practices of the post–World War I period (the Teapot Dome financial scandal, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the economic depression following the stock market crash of 1929) did not reflect well on the democracy Americans aspired to have. President Wilson might claim that the world was “safe for democracy,” but his piece of the world, the United States, did not admirably demonstrate it at the time. Nor, of course, did the new Soviet Russia, recently emerged both from incredible losses in World War I and from the yoke of the czars and now engaging in a different form of authoritarian rule. Germany, principal adversary of the Allies in World War I, entered the 1920s badly broken. The Germans attempted a new and ultimately unstable form of government before acquiescing to Hitler’s takeover in 1933, resulting in a devastating defeat of democracy. As the Roaring Twenties took off, American educators, always anxious to be au courant with what was expected of them, found their old priorities obsolete. Prescient school men recognized that the focus was shifting from schools serving a need defined by the nation (assimilation) to one defined by informed, ambitious, and often affluent parents seeking a more supportive school environment for their children and by newly articulate professors of education.

scholarly journals Delivering Public Health Insurance Through Private Plan Choice in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Private Insurance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Health Insurance ◽  
Market Failures ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Government

The United States has seen a sea change in the way that publicly financed health insurance coverage is provided to low-income, elderly, and disabled enrollees. When programs such as Medicare and Medicaid were introduced in the 1960s, the government directly reimbursed medical providers for the care that they provided, through a classic “single payer system.” Since the mid-1980s, however, there has been an evolution towards a model where the government subsidizes enrollees who choose among privately provided insurance options. In the United States, privatized delivery of public health insurance appears to be here to stay, with debates now focused on how much to expand its reach. Yet such privatized delivery raises a variety of thorny issues. Will choice among private insurance options lead to adverse selection and market failures in privatized insurance markets? Can individuals choose appropriately over a wide range of expensive and confusing plan options? Will a privatized approach deliver the promised increases in delivery efficiency claimed by advocates? What policy mechanisms have been used, or might be used, to address these issues? A growing literature in health economics has begun to make headway on these questions. In this essay, I discuss that literature and the lessons for both economics more generally and health care policymakers more specifically.

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