Poor Children Have Lesser Chances to be Hospitalized, Study Confirms

During Emergency Room visits, poor children or publicly insured children have lesser chances to be admitted in the hospital compared to children with private health insurance, a latest study found out. The study on inequalities in health was conducted by Janet Currie and Diane Alexander, famous Princeton economists, and was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The research used a unique data centered on all the health records of children aged 3-13 years who visited the Emergency Room of New Jersey hospital from year 2006 to 2012. Researchers discovered that nearly 10% of poor children who visited ER have less chance to be hospitalized at ordinary times.

According to the research, all similar (privately and publicly) children patients were actually treated by the hospital and no kids were rejected. However, what's only bothering is that, as shown by the research, hospitals favor the privately insured children over publicly insured children for hospitalization.

"When the hospital has the capacity, then it will take both private and public patients," the two Princeton economists noted. But when there's scarcity in bed supplies, hospitals, as reported by economists, have a clear reason to favor private insured children patients.

In the The Washington Post, Alexander said through an email that: "Our results suggest that hospitals are more likely to admit children with private insurance than with public insurance when beds are scarce." But we found no proof that this differential treatment decodes into differential health results, which increases the chance that overall admission tolls might be very high, she added.