Did Public Health Insurance Extensions Improve Childrens Utilization of Health Care?
Although it is argued above that the goal of child health policy should be to improve health rather than merely to increase the utilization of care, in some cases, improvements in health are most likely to be obtained through increases in the use of medical care. Hence, this section considers the evidence regarding the effectiveness of the public health insurance expansions in increasing the utilization of care. The first subsection offers a brief overview of these expansions. The second section deals with the problem of “takeup.” The implication of this discussion for child care policy is that a policy that was like Medicaid, in that it made some children eligible for free or reduced price child care, would presumably also fail to achieve full takeup among eligibles, and might have particularly low takeup among some groups, such as immigrants. As in Medicaid, low takeup might be due to the transactions costs associated with establishing eligibility for means-tested programs; to lack o
