Some 2.3 million children a year, mostly from low- to middle-income families, have no healthcare coverage to pay for preventive or other medical needs, even though at least one of their parents is insured, according to a new study supported by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the National Center for Research Resources, part of HHS' National Institutes of Health.
The new study, published in the October 22/29, 2008 online issue of JAMA, is one of the first to examine the characteristics of uninsured children under age 19 whose parents were insured all year. These children account for a quarter of the estimated 9 million uninsured children in the United States. Read an abstract of the JAMA article.
Researchers led by Jennifer DeVoe, M.D., of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, studied 2002-2005 national data from AHRQ's Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and found that children from low-income families where at least one parent had health insurance were more than twice as likely to be uninsured at some point during the year as were similar children from high-income families. They were also 73 percent more likely to be uninsured for more than 6 months. In 2005, a typical, low-income family of four earned between roughly $24,000 and $39,000, whereas the typical high-income family of four earned more than $77,000 a year.
