Children Suffer When Parents Can't Afford Health Insurance Coverage

Published: Tue 04 May 2010

Thomas Kristoffersen

Families harm their children's health when they must choose between health care and household essentials, such as rent, food, and utilities, according to a new study.

The study had 6,447 low-income caregivers with kids who ranged in age from newborn to three years old. The researchers asked the participants whether they had to choose between household expenses and medical care, whether they had medical insurance, and about their children's medical history.

Five percent of the surveyed caregivers reported making trade-offs to buy health care. The most common means of doing so were not paying utilities (32 percent), mortgage/rent (25 percent), or going without food (21 percent), according to the Children's Health Watch researchers, headquartered at Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health and Boston Medical Center.

The study also discovered that kids in families who had to make these trade-offs were at higher risk for hospitalization, poor health, developmental problems, and shorter stature, a common sign of malnutrition.

"Family hardships and high out-of-pocket health care costs are written on the bodies of babies," said the study's lead author, Stephanie A. Ettinger de Cuba.

Ettinger de Cuba and her colleagues discovered that families who chose to forego essentials in order to afford medical care had more education and were more likely to breast-feed and be married. These families' children were more likely to have no health insurance than children in families not forced to choose between basic necessities and medical care.

"This suggests that families who had to make trade-offs are experiencing a paradoxical situation in which caregivers do not earn enough to pay for private insurance for their children, nor do they earn so little that their children can qualify for public insurance, leaving them uninsured and unable to afford both medical costs and basic needs," Ettinger de Cuba explained.

The researchers will present the study at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies on Sunday.