Coverage Matters for Families

Understanding how and why lack of insurance matters for families provides further insight into the menacing effects of uninsurance; it clarifies some of the less obvious reasons why coverage matters.

The insurance status of individual family members affects access to and use of care by others. Lower income families often encounter a bewildering patchwork of coverage options, which makes negotiating the health care system difficult. Parents often make health care decisions for younger family members and their experience with the health care system will influence children’s access to and use of care.

Who Is Covered?

About 1 in 5 families with children (19 percent) had at least one uninsured member in 2000.

Families with one or more uninsured members lacked the income to pay for it.

Only 59 percent of families with incomes under half the poverty level were fully covered whereas 95 percent of families that earned over 200 percent of the poverty level were.

Parents in lower-income families were one-and-one-half times less likely to be insured than their children because eligibility limits for public coverage were higher for children than adults.

In two-parent households with both parents insured, 98 percent of children had coverage. In single-parent households, when the parent was insured, 95 percent of children were covered.

However, the chance that a single-parent family had no insured members was double that of two-parent families.