Health services use and health care expenditures for children with disabilities

Title

Health services use and health care expenditures for children with disabilities

Creator

Newacheck P; Inkelas M; Kim SE

Publisher

Pediatrics

Date

2004

Subject

Child; Humans; United States; Prevalence; Health Care Surveys; Multivariate Analysis; Income; adolescent; Preschool; P.H.S.; Research Support; U.S. Gov't; infant; Health; Insurance; Health Services/utilization; Disabled Children/statistics & numerical data; Cost Sharing/statistics & numerical data; Financing; Health Expenditures/statistics & numerical data; Home Care Services/economics/utilization; Hospitalization/economics/statistics & numerical data; Office Visits/utilization; Personal/statistics & numerical data

Description

OBJECTIVE: To examine health care utilization and expenditure patterns for children with disabilities. METHODS: Secondary data analysis was conducted of the 1999 and 2000 editions of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), a nationally representative survey conducted in 5 rounds by household interview. Two years of MEPS data were combined in this analysis to improve the precision of estimates. Disability was defined by the presence of a limitation in age-appropriate social role activities, such as school or play, or receipt of specialized services through the early intervention or special education programs. The survey sample included 13,792 children younger than 18 years. The overall response rate was 65.5%. RESULTS: Our findings demonstrate that the 7.3% of US children with disabilities used many more services than their counterparts without disabilities in 1999-2000. The largest differences in utilization were for hospital days (464 vs 55 days per 1000), nonphysician professional visits (3.0 vs 0.6), and home health provider days (3.8 vs 0.04). As a result of their greater use, children with disabilities also had much higher health care expenditures (2669 dollars vs 676 dollars) and higher out-of-pocket expenditures (297 dollars vs 189 dollars). We also found that the distributions of total and out-of-pocket expenses were highly skewed, with a small fraction of the disabled population accounting for a large proportion of expenditures: the upper decile accounted for 65% of total health care expenses and 85% of all out-of-pocket expenses for the population with disabilities. Health insurance was found to convey significant protection against financially burdensome expenses. However, even after controlling for insurance status, low-income families experienced greater financial burdens than higher income families. CONCLUSIONS: The skewed distribution of out-of-pocket expenses found in this and earlier studies indicates that the financial burden of childhood disability continues to be shared unevenly by families. Low-income families are especially vulnerable to burdensome out-of-pocket expenses. Additional efforts are needed to protect these high-risk families.
2004

Rights

Article information provided for research and reference use only. PedPalASCNET does not hold any rights over the resource listed here. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).

Type

Journal Article

Citation List Month

Backlog

Citation

Newacheck P; Inkelas M; Kim SE, “Health services use and health care expenditures for children with disabilities,” Pediatric Palliative Care Library, accessed December 4, 2024, https://pedpalascnetlibrary.omeka.net/items/show/12645.