Article Abstract:
Newborn infants who lack health insurance and those covered by Medicaid may not receive adequate hospital services. A survey of discharge data for 29,751 seriously ill newborn infants hospitalized in California in 1987 found that uninsured infants and infants covered by Medicaid were discharged sooner and had smaller hospital bills than infants covered by private insurance. Uninsured infants remained in the hospital for an average of 12.7 days, Medicaid-covered infants remained for an average of 14.2 days and infants covered by private insurance remained an average of 15.2 days. Care given to uninsured infants cost an average of $11,414, care given to Medicaid-covered infants cost an average of $13,858 and care given to privately-insured infants cost an average of $15,899. Cost per day was also less for uninsured and Medicaid-covered infants. This was true even though uninsured and Medicaid-covered infants had more serious health problems than privately-insured infants.
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Article Abstract:
Many pregnant women without private health insurance in California may not receive adequate prenatal care despite expansion of Medi-Cal benefits. Medi-Cal is California's Medicaid program. A study examined prenatal care received by pregnant women in California with and without private health insurance in 1990. Among 593,510 women who gave birth to a live infant during 1990, 11% did not have any type of health insurance coverage for prenatal care, 33% were insured by Medi-Cal and 50% were insured by private health insurance. Twenty-six percent of the women did not receive prenatal care early enough, 28% had too few prenatal appointments and 2% received no prenatal care at all. Women without health insurance or who were insured by Medi-Cal were less likely to receive adequate prenatal care than those who had private health insurance.
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Article Abstract:
Several widespread standard practices in socioeconomic status (SES) measurement, discussing key concepts and providing examples to illustrate problems with those practices are examined. Evidence reveal that conclusions about nonsocioeconomic causes of racial/ethnic differences in health might depend on the measure such as income, wealth and education, suggesting that findings from studies that have measured limited aspects of SES should be reassessed.
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