Fragmentation of family health care
Uninsured Children and Adolescents With Insured Parents
By Jennifer E. DeVoe, MD, DPhil; Carrie Tillotson, MPH; Lorraine S. Wallace, PhD
JAMA
October 22/29, 2008
The association between coverage for parents and their children has been widely reported. When entire families have access to health insurance, children and adolescents not only benefit from more consistent insurance coverage but also have improved access to a regular source of care and higher rates of preventive services. If entire families cannot gain consistent coverage, it is most often their children who have insurance while the parents go uncovered, especially since the creation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Less is known, however, about how commonly this pattern is reversed.
Although the weighted results of this survey indicated that the largest group of uninsured children and adolescents had uninsured parents, an estimated 27.9% of the uninsured children and adolescents had parents with health insurance. When weighted, these estimates represent 3 million children who had a coverage gap despite having at least 1 parent who had full-year coverage. More than a million of these children were without coverage for the entire year.
Evidence suggests that when family members are covered separately under different plans or when certain individuals have coverage and others do not, children’s health declines. Furthermore, if the assumption that insurance coverage is a “household good” is abandoned and the system shifts toward defining it as an “individual good,” we add layers of complexity for vulnerable families who must simultaneously learn different systems for enrollment and utilization of multiple insurance plans. Discordant patterns of family health insurance may become the norm rather than the exception; the current trend is certainly moving in that direction.
If families are better off covered under one plan but US society rejects a public health insurance program for all members of the family, the question of whether the employer-based model is sustainable may need to be revisited. In this study, the private system did not do a good job of providing coverage for entire families.
Incremental expansions in public insurance programs for children will continue to improve insurance rates in the short term. However, the longer-term solutions to keeping all children insured are likely to be more complicated. Unless health insurance coverage models are designed to keep entire families covered, some children will continue to get left behind.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/300/16/1904
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
It has long been recognized that one of the deficiencies of the children’s health insurance program (SCHIP) is that parents in these lower income families often remain uninsured. This study demonstrates that the reverse also occurs. Even though one or both parents may be insured, often through their employment, the children may be left without coverage, primarily due to eligibility and affordability issues.
This study also reinforces the principle that simply increasing the numbers of insured through patchwork programs is not an adequate goal. Our goal should be to ensure comprehensive, coordinated, continuous care for each individual and each family by establishing equitably-financed medical homes for everyone.
Stable, continuous, coordinated family care is almost impossible under the current system. Both employer-sponsored and individual private plans continue to change based on employment status, employer decisions on plans, variations in participation in provider networks, comprehensiveness of the benefits, employee ability to contribute to the premium, and other factors largely not under control of the individual. Public programs also have similar variations in networks and coverage, and, in addition, have changing eligibility requirements for enrollment sometimes related to legislative and administrative budget decisions.
Today almost no family has the same stable coverage for all family members from birth until the children leave the home (and for the parents after the children have left). Nor can they be assured that they will be able to continue their care with the same physicians, hospitals and other health care professionals.
The future looks bleak. Congressional leaders have promised to expand the SCHIP program, which will tend to perpetuate the instability and fragmentation of care. Then they will begin the effort to patch together the great multitude of private plans into some semblance of a social insurance program. They will fail miserably because the U.S. private plans, based on a business model, have no glue to hold them together. The private insurers will continue to fight to insure only the healthy - the eighty percent of people who use only twenty percent of health care - while selling us an excess of superfluous administrative services. They will dump on us most of the actual costs of health care - the eighty percent of health care spending - through taxes, cost shifting, or simply relying on our stretched-thin charity.
It is astounding that the policy community continues to pursue these fragmented, incremental reforms that pump up costs while leaving health care in a tattered, dysfunctional state. With a single payer national health program, at least the entire family would have affordable access to the professionals and hospitals of their choice. That would be a great start.