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PEDIATRICS Vol. 111 No. 4 April 2003, pp. 893-895

COMMENTARY

Mandated Child Health Insurance: An Approach Whose Time Has Come?

Abbreviations: SCHIP, State Children’s Health Insurance Program

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Pediatric health services research has documented that uninsured children are less likely to receive needed medical, mental health, and dental services and are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes.1 Uninsured children can be defined in 1 of the following 3 ways: 1) lacking insurance during a specified period of time, usually the most recent calendar year or past 12 months; 2) lacking insurance at any time during a specified period of time; or 3) lacking insurance at the specific point in time when a survey is done. During the first 3 years of life about one quarter of our nation’s children have at least 1 month when they are uninsured and over one half of these children remain uninsured for >6 months.2

The rate of uninsured children is constantly changing with the state of the economy, increases in employer insurance premiums, and changes in access to public insurance programs. Current economic conditions suggest that the number of uninsured children is rising from ~8.5 million reported from 1998 to 2000 to perhaps more than the 11 million reported for 1997.3 However, there is a great deal of confusion associated with estimating the number of uninsured children because of differences among surveys with respect to when and how often they are administered, numbers of survey respondents and their geographic distribution, insurance definitions, age classifications, and other measurement issues.4

Using the 1999 National Survey of America’s Families survey, the Urban Institute estimated that among the country’s 72 million children, 51.2% were eligible for a publicly financed health plan, 33.4% were eligible for Medicaid, and 17.8% were eligible for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).5 During this time period only 20.4% of children were enrolled in Medicaid and SCHIP based on Current Population Survey survey data. This means that only 39.8% of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Stephen Berman, MD

Department of Pediatrics
Children’s Hospital
University of Colorado School of Medicine
Denver, CO 80218

Address correspondence to Stephen Berman, MD, Children’s Hospital, 1056 E 19th Ave, B032, Denver, CO 80218. E-mail: berman.stephen@tchden.org




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