Continuity of Health Insurance Coverage and Perceived Health at Age 40

Abstract

While a lack of health insurance or interrupted coverage has been shown to lead to poorer health status among preretirement populations, this phenomenon has not been examined among a large population of younger, working-age adults. We analyzed a nationally representative data set of persons born between 1957 and 1961, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979, to examine the links between insurance continuity and self-assessed physical and mental health at age 40. Among respondents turning 40 in 1998 or 2000, 59.8% had been continuously insured during the decade before they reached age 40. In unadjusted analysis, persons who were continuously covered had the highest scores for both physical and mental health. After controlling for respondent characteristics, insurance coverage was not significantly associated with perceived physical or mental health.

Insurance Continuity and Receipt of Diabetes Preventive Care in a Network of Federally Qualified Health Centers

“…In interpreting this finding, we note that the racial/ethnic groups in our study are heterogeneous; for example, the NH white patients include many recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who have diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Another consideration is that NH whites may be more likely to obtain private insurance over the course of a given year,37,40,41 and thus may receive preventive services elsewhere. So, while the “reverse disparities” described here account for age, socioeconomic status, and insurance patterns, many other life circumstances likely differ between minority and non-minority patients at these clinics and may have influenced our findings.…”

“…Further clouding our understanding of the role insurance status plays in outcomes and treatment of patients at FQHCs is the fact that most previous research has treated insurance status as a static variable, despite evidence that coverage of underinsured persons is often quite fluid, changing frequently 37–41. OCHIN’s sophisticated data systems present a unique tool to further our understanding of how health insurance status may affect diabetes care in FQHCs, and allow us to examine continuity of insurance coverage over time.…”

U.S. Citizen Children of Undocumented Parents: The Link Between State Immigration Policy and the Health of Latino Children

“…One of the more important controls in our model is for insurance coverage, as previous literature has found that having access to health insurance influences Latino health outcomes [30,31]. …”

UQ eSpace

“…Longitudinal data has most commonly been used to examine the effect of health insurance on long-term outcomes such as mortality. Several papers have attempted to identify the causal effect of health insurance by controlling for observed potential confounders, reporting a mix of positive and null effects (Hogan et al 2015;Kronick 2009;McWilliams et al 2004;Probst et al 2008;Sareen et al 2016;Wilper et al 2009). For example, Black et al (2017) estimated the effect of initial insurance status at age 51-61 on mortality and health over twenty years, controlling for an extensive set of covariates through propensity score matching and allowed the effect of insurance to vary over time.…”

“…10: Correlation between PHI and other variables, for sample available for analysis with SF-36 scores (N = 77,323) *, and *** indicate statistical significance at the 5%, 1%, and 0.1% level, respectively.5 Econometric frameworkThe primary dependent variables are self-assessed health, SF-36 mental health score, SF-36 physical health score, and Kessler psychological distress score. The SF-36 and the Kessler scores are continuous variables which, despite their skew, are typically estimated with linear models in the literature(Alang, McAlpine & Henning-Smith 2014;Baicker et al 2013;Miller & Wherry 2018;Probst et al 2008; Weathers & Stegman 2012). However, selfassessed health is an ordinal variable.…”