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Jul 29, 2005 -
A recently published report shows that the Clinton administration’s "welfare reform" left adults at, near or below the poverty line unable to afford regular medical visits and reporting poor or average health conditions at three times the rate of the general population.
"The Impact of Welfare Reforms, Health, and Insurance Status on Welfare Recipients’ Health Care Status," lays out the results of an analysis study conducted by University of Alabama Anthropologist Tyrone Cheng and appears in the July issue of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. The study was based on a survey of 1,259 adults between the ages of eighteen and 64. The data was obtained from the United States Census Bureau and the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The author reports that within the first four years after the massive restructuring of programs for government assistance to needy people, about 50 percent of former recipients lost welfare and around one million adults lost access to Medicaid after leaving welfare rolls. Of those, fewer than 15 percent gained health coverage from their new employers, leaving a total of over 34 percent of former welfare recipients without any form of health insurance, the report notes.
According to data reported by the study -- which mostly included information about people who were making twice the poverty level income or less -- one quarter reported being in poor or fair health, three times the level of the US adult population as a whole. In 2000, the poverty level for a single person was $8,794, and for a family of four it was $17,603, according to the US Census Bureau.
Of the uninsured in poor health, over 70 percent reported that they could not afford to visit a doctor. In addition, the study found that an increase in income had little effect on uninsured individuals’ use of health care services when not accompanied by employer-provided health insurance.
As a group, poor people are about half as likely to visit a doctor in any given year since welfare reform was enacted, the report said.
In addition, residents of states with more restrictive government assistance programs generally reported fewer doctor visits, less access to prescription drugs and relatively few, if any, dental visits.
An exception to that finding came with people who remained unemployed and were kicked off Medicaid. They "demonstrated a degree of resourcefulness about health services, for instance obtaining their prescriptions in the form of free samples from physicians," Cheng wrote.
Poor Hispanics appear to be most adversely affected, due to language and cultural barriers, the report found.
