Health Insurance, Access, and Use: California - Tabulations from the 1997 National Survey of America's Families

Health Insurance,Access, and Use:CaliforniaTabulations from the1997 National Surveyof America’s Families00–02Contact Persons: Jennifer M. Haley (jhaley@ui.urban.org)Stephen Zuckerman (szuckerm@ui.urban.org)July 2000An Urban InstituteProgram to AssessChanging Social PoliciesAssessingthe NewFederalismState Profiles Assessing the New FederalismAssessing the New Federalism is a multiyear Urban Institute project designed to analyze the devolutionof responsibility for social programs from the federal government to the states. It focuses primarily onhealth care, income security, employment and training programs, and social services. Researchers mon-itor program changes and fiscal developments. Alan Weil is the project director. In collaboration withChild Trends, the project studies changes in family well-being. The project provides timely, nonparti-san information to inform public debate and to help state and local decisionmakers carry out their newresponsibilities more effectively.Key components of the project include a household survey, studies of policies in 13 states, and a data-base with information on all states and the District of Columbia. Publications and database are avail-able free of charge on the Urban Institute’s Web site: http://www.urban.org. This paper is one in aseries of discussion papers analyzing information from these and other sources.This paper received special funding from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, aproject of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Additional funding came from The Annie E. CaseyFoundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Henry J. KaiserFamily Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, theCharles Stewart Mott Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The McKnightFoundation, The Commonwealth Fund, the Stuart Foundation, the Weingart Foundation, The Fund forNew Jersey, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and The RockefellerFoundation. Diligent programming support was provided by Emily Greenman and Aparna Lhila.The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of pub-lic consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the UrbanInstitute, its trustees, its funders, or other authors in the series.Publisher: The Urban Institute, 2100 M Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037 Copyright © 2000.Permission is granted for reproduction of this document, with attribution to the Urban Institute. 1The tables that follow are based on data collected through the National Survey ofAmerica’s Families (NSAF) – a household survey conducted as part of the UrbanInstitute’s Assessing the New Federalism (ANF) project. ANF is a multiyear researchproject designed to analyze the devolution of responsibility for social programs from thefederal government to the states. The project is national in scope, but it selected 13focal states for intensive study. These states include Alabama, California, Colorado,Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York,Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin (see Kondratas, Weil, and Goldstein 1998 for moredetails). The NSAF was fielded in 1997 and 1999 and is planned for 2002. These tabulations for California are based on the 1997 round of NSAF andprovide information on a variety of measures of insurance coverage, access, andutilization that allow for comparisons between the state and the rest of the nation. Theintent of this report is to provide basic descriptive data in an easily accessible form, butnot to offer interpretations or explanations. Assessment of the meaning of these data isleft to the reader, although a variety of analytic efforts are under way at the UrbanInstitute.Tables 1 through 10 show the distribution of types of insurance coverage(employer, other private, Medicaid/state program, other public and uninsured) for allnonelderly residents of California and the nation as a whole by selected subgroups.Subgroups are defined based on age, family income, gender, race/ethnicity, familystructure, family work status, firm size (for workers), community type, and country oforigin. Table 11 presents characteristics of the uninsured. Table 12 summarizesestimates of uninsurance rates for each of the subgroups shown in Table 11. Tables 13and 13a describe characteristics of all Medicaid enrollees and poor and near-poorMedicaid enrollees, respectively. Tables 14 - 17 are supplemented by Tables 14a - 17a,which contain data on the low-income subgroup (defined as people in households withincomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level). Tables 14 and 14a presentindicators of access to health care for children by type of insurance. Tables 15 and 15aparallel the preceding children’s tables, but with data on access to health care foradults. Tab