USA Evidence on the Relation between Health Insurance, Outpatient Services and Inpatient Services for Children ACSC

The purpose of the study is to identify influence of health insurance status on ambulatory care (outpatient) visits as primary care accessibility and on hospitalization as health outcome caused by lack of primary care accessibility, and to explore the factors affecting outpatient visits, hospitalization caused by lack of outpatient visits.One of indicators to identify the relationship between access to health care service caused by health insurance status and health service utilization is Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions (ACSC), which are conditions that when timely and effectively treated in the outpatient setting can help reduce the risk of hospitalizations by preventing onset of an illness. The study chooses ACSC to test the relationship the lack of primary care and hospitalization among diseases.We use the available recent health care survey data (i.e. 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey; MEPS96). We find out the positive relationship between hospitalization and no health insurance, and the negative relationship between outpatient visit and no health insurance. This indicates that reducing accessibility for outpatient visit caused by no health insurance results in increasing hospitalization. Furthermore, this result strongly suggests that the uninsured children is actually not able to care in early disease stage so that they are likely to hospitalization when their disease was more sever and then they need long stay for cure. As a result, fortifying the accessibility to necessary health care in a way of sharing appropriately the role with private health insurance can lead to the efficiency of national health care delivery systems in view of total health care expenditure, in particular in a case of ACSC children. Additionally, this kind of health policy may be expected to reform gradually the population structure such as aging, aged and super-aged society.