Reports from Northwestern University Advance Knowledge in Managed Care (How Child Health Financing and Payment Mitigate and Perpetuate Structural Racism): Managed Care

2024 DEC 30 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Research findings on Managed Care are discussed in a new report. According to news reporting originating in Evanston, Illinois, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “Health financing for children and youth comes mainly from commercial sources (especially, a parent’s employer-sponsored insurance) and public sources (especially, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Plan [CHIP]). These 2 sources serve populations that differ in race and ethnicity.”

Financial support for this research came from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).

The news reporters obtained a quote from the research from Northwestern University, “This inherent segregation perpetuates a system of disparities in health and health care. Medicaid (and CHIP) have become the largest single provider of health insurance to US children and youth, currently insuring over 50% of all children and youth, with even higher rates for children of racial and ethnic minorities. Medicaid provides substantial benefit to the populations it insures, with good evidence of both short- and long-term improved health and developmental outcomes, and better health and well-being as adults. Nonetheless, some characteristics of Medicaid, especially the major state-by-state variation in eligibility, enrollment practices, and covered services, along with persistent low payment rates, have helped to maintain a separate and unequal health program for racial and ethnic minority children and youth.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “Several changes in Medicaid-including linking CHIP more closely with Medicaid, strengthening national standards of payment and care, assuring coverage of all children, and incorporating social and family risk adjustment-could make the program even more beneficial and diminish racial differences in child health financing.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: How Child Health Financing and Payment Mitigate and Perpetuate Structural Racism. Academic Pediatrics, 2024;24(7). Academic Pediatrics can be contacted at: Elsevier Science Inc, Ste 800, 230 Park Ave, New York, NY 10169, USA. (Elsevier - www.elsevier.com; Academic Pediatrics - http://www.journals.elsevier.com/academic-pediatrics/)

Our news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Jennifer D. Kusma, Northwestern University, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Dept. of Pediatrics, Div Adv Gen Pediat & Primary Care, Evanston, IL 60208, United States. Additional authors for this research include Alexy Arauz Boudreau and James M. Perrin.

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)