Survey Finds Fewer Uninsured Children, More Uninsured Adults In Ohio

Main Category: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 19 Mar 2009 - 5:00 PDT

email to a friend   printer friendly   opinions  

The number of Ohio children with health insurance increased over the past four years, but more adults were uninsured as unemployment rates increased and people lost their employer-sponsored coverage, according to the 2008 Ohio Family Health Survey released on Monday, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. The state-funded survey of more than 51,000 families was conducted by Macro International between August 2008 and January and co-sponsored by the Health Policy Institute of Ohio and the Ohio State University College of Medicine Government Resource Center. The survey was last conducted in 2004.

The survey found that from August 2008 to January:

• 17% of adults ages 18 to 64, or 1.2 million people, were uninsured, up by 2%, or more than 165,200 adults, since 2004;
  
  
• 30% of adults ages 18 to 24 were uninsured, making it the largest group of working-age adults without insurance;
  
  
• Uninsurance rates among children dropped from 5.4% in 2004 to 4% in 2008. State officials attributed the drop to the expansion of CHIP;
  
  
• Nearly 70% of the 111,255 uninsured children in the state were in families with annual incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level, meaning they were eligible but not enrolled in government-sponsored health coverage;
  
  
• More than 60% of elderly residents did not have dental coverage and 45% did not have vision-care coverage;
  
  
• More than 56% of uninsured working-age residents faced difficulty paying their medical bills;
  
  
• Hispanic children were more than three times more likely to be uninsured than white children;
  
  
• Working-age black adults were nearly two times as likely as white adults to be uninsured; and
  
  
• Uninsured rates were higher among those with lower education levels.

In addition, fewer businesses in the state were offering health benefits to their employees, the Enquirer reports. Doug Anderson, chief policy officer at the Ohio Department of Insurance, said that the number of adults who reported having employer-sponsored health coverage dropped by 2% in 2008, compared with 2004 (Craig, Cincinnati Enquirer, 3/17).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

© 2009 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

• Additional
• References
• Citations