HEALTHCARE ACCESS AND SATISFACTION WITH CARE BY INSURANCE TYPE AMONG CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL HEALTH CARE NEEDS: A SUMMARY REPORT AND KEY FINDINGS FROM NEW MEXICO

Purpose (a): This article reports new findings from the 2009-2010 National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs (NS-CSHCN) regarding parental opinion on access to health care and satisfaction with care according to insurance type. The report highlights descriptive summary comparing findings from the state of New Mexico, one of the eight states of the Mountain States Genetics Regional Collaborative (MSGRC), to the entire mountain state region and to the nation. The focus is on New Mexico because demographically the state of New Mexico is found to be the underprivileged state in terms of its socioeconomic status. Methods (b): Data on 40,242 children included in the NS-CSHCN were used to create the baseline descriptive for the entire nation. A sub group for the MSGRC“REGION” was created with 6,334 observations, which included data from 8 states1. Finally, the analysis was narrowed down to only New Mexico to study the association between health care access and satisfaction with care by insurance type and impact of language barrier. Results (c): According to this national survey, 13.8% of children under age 17 in New Mexico have special healthcare needs compared to 15.1% nationwide1. The respondents are 50% more likely to be Hispanics and approximately 30% are living below the 100% Federal Poverty Level compared to the region and the nation. Families covered by public insurance expressed lower level of satisfaction with care thereby utilizing low quality of care as compared to those who are privately insured. Additionally, parents of Hispanic children whose household language is not English were almost 5 times more likely than their counterparts to go without a usual source of care. Conclusions (d): The findings indicate that those who are publicly insured expressed lower level of satisfaction with care compared to those who are privately insured. In addition, language barrier is another leading cause of diminished access to usual source of care. These conclusions suggest that the coverage of public insurance certainly needs to be revised in order to deliver high quality care for CSHCN targeting non-English speaking Hispanic households with low socio-economic status.