Human Services News

Mathematica Policy Research

Mathematica conducted this survey of parents with children enrolled in the Los Angeles Healthy Kids program. Early findings reveal that the initiative is improving children's access to primary care and easing parents' concerns about meeting their children's health care needs.

Parents believe having their children enrolled in Healthy Kids gives them considerable assurance that they can meet their children's health care needs.

Preliminary findings from a survey of parents with children enrolled in the Los Angeles Healthy Kids program reveal that the initiative is improving children's access to primary care and easing parents' concerns about meeting their children's health care needs.

Initially designed to cover children under age 6, Healthy Kids obtained additional financing and extended eligibility to children though age 18 in May 2004.

Families with incomes above 133 percent of the federal poverty level are required to pay a sliding scale premium and all enrollees face some co-payment at the point of service.

This brief presents preliminary results on differences in perceived and realized access to care from the initial survey of established and new enrollees that was conducted as part of the Los Angeles Healthy Kids Initiative evaluation.

Since new and established enrollees differ in a number of characteristics associated with access to and use of health care services, we use multivariate logistic regression to control for characteristics of the child and the child's family when comparing the experiences of the two groups.

In this brief, we compare the experience of established Healthy Kids enrollees who have been in the program for at least one year with the experience of new Healthy Kids enrollees before they entered the pro-FIGURE 3.

Her research has focused on the impact of expansions of the Medicaid program, insurance coverage, access to and use of health care services, and health outcomes.