Poster #22 - The Relation Between Parental Status, Health Insurance Coverage, and Health Care Utilization: A Latent Class Analysis

• In Event: 3-001 - Poster Session 2 during Breakfast

Abstract

Health disparities are mitigated when Americans have access to health insurance (Shi, Starfield, Politzer, & Regan, 2002). Parental status has been identified as a potential determinant of insurance coverage (Davidoff et al., 2003). Additionally, children whose parents have insurance coverage (including parents covered by expansions in Medicaid) are more likely to be insured and to receive care (Dubay & Kenny, 2003). Parental status is an underexplored determinant of both insurance coverage and utilization of care and has important implications for children’s health. In this study, we used data from the 2010 Health Tracking Household Survey, a nationally representative survey of civilian Americans (n = 13254, Mage = 50.28, SDage = 17.58, 33.4% parents) to examine the relation between parental status and health insurance coverage and health care utilization.

We employed a multiple group latent class analysis (LCA) using parental status as a predictor of class membership. Indicator variables for the classes included type of insurance coverage (public, private, or uninsured), and in the past 12 months, whether respondents put off needed medical care, whether they did not get needed medical care, and whether they were unable to get a necessary prescription filled. We identified four distinct classes based on access to healthcare (“access”) and healthcare utilization (“use”): (1) high access/high use; (2) low access/high use; (3) high access/low use; and (4) low access/low use (see Table 1). Using the high access/high use class as a reference group and parental status as predictor, we found that parents, compared to non-parents, were more likely to belong to the high access/high use than the low access/high use class. Parents were also more likely than non-parents to belong to the high access/low use class as compared to the high access/high use class. The high access/low use class differed from the high access/high use class by the fact that the high access/low use class were more likely to put off needed medical care, less likely to get necessary prescriptions, and probability was split on getting medical needs met. Our findings suggest that parents, compared to non-parents, were more likely to put off their own medical care among those privately insured. However, parents were less likely than non-parents to be in the low access/high use class, which had somewhat similar attributes to the high access/high use class, except insurance type was either uninsured or public. Implications for family-based healthcare policies will be discussed.

Authors

• Ashley Marie Ebbert, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Jenna Rudo-Stern, Arizona State University

• Holly P. O’Rourke, Arizona State University

• Daisy E. Camacho-Thompson, Arizona State University