Health Statistics

The Cato Institute recently released a study of health reform in Massachusetts by Aaron Yelowitz and Michael F. Cannon, entitled "The Massachusetts Health Plan: Much Pain, Little Gain." That study reports fewer gains in health insurance coverage and higher costs than have been reported by earlier studies. As the Urban Institute has done a substantial amount of research on health reform in Massachusetts, we have received a number of requests to reconcile the findings on health insurance coverage from the Cato study with the findings from earlier work. This paper is a response to those requests.

In this analysis, a health reform scenario is modeled that would expand Medicaid to an estimated 17.0 million uninsured individuals with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), would provide subsidies to 16.3 million uninsured individuals with incomes between 133 and 399 percent of the FPL, and would require an additional 4.3 million uninsured individuals to obtain coverage through an individual mandate, though they would not be eligible for Medicaid or subsidies. The first brief contains an overview of the entire nonelderly uninsured population, and the three remaining briefs address children, parents and childless adults, respectively.

This project uses data from the 2005/2006 National Health Interview Survey to provide a profile of the prevalence of different types of disability and employment among TANF recipients. We find that prevalence of disability varies widely depending on the specific measure used. Using narrow and broad composite disability measures, anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of TANF recipients have a disability and almost one-fifth have a family member with a disability. Disability prevalence among Food Stamp recipients is similar to TANF but low-income mothers have lower prevalence on almost all measures. Employment among TANF recipients with disabilities is considerably lower than among recipients without disabilities.

This brief, part of the Urban Institute's "Recession and Recover" series, examines how the Medicaid and SCHIP programs respond during a recession and how that response may differ in the current recession from their responses in the past. It also assesses the extent to which health insurance coverage may decline as unemployment rises.

This study explores the link between community risk factors and childhood obesity using data on child obesity from the 1988-1994 National Health and Examination Survey, the 2002-2004 National Medical Expenditures Survey, and the 2003-2004 National Survey of Children's Health, combined with data on community characteristics from a wide variety of sources. Multivariate models that relate child obesity to the characteristics of the child's community are used to predict the "risk of childhood obesity" for communities in the United States. The report includes maps and community profiles for 50 states and the District of Columbia.