Health & Medicine - Posted by Syl Kacapyr-Cornell on Thursday, September 13, 2012 10:27 - 1 Comment 
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Kids of immigrants often left out of health care
Because most children in immigrant families were born in the United States, they are eligible for government assistance on the same basis as other US citizens, but they have the poorest health and are least likely to see a doctor or dentist compared to all other children. (Credit: "row of chairs in the hospital" via Shutterstock)
CORNELL (US) — Parents’ immigration status makes a big difference in children’s health and access to health care, reports a new study of low-income families in the US.
Share this article
Email
Republish this article
The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The researchers found that low-income children of immigrants have significantly poorer health and see doctors and dentists less often than low-income children born to parents who are citizens.
Further, those with at least one nonpermanent resident parent have the poorest health and are least likely to visit a doctor or a dentist compared to all other children.
“Our findings underscore the idea that those with more precarious immigration statuses show the poorest health outcomes, and that families with noncitizen members face barriers, real or perceived, to using relevant programs, in this case, health-related programs,” says Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest, a postdoctoral associate in the department of policy analysis and management in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, who led the study.
Immigrants make up less than 13 percent of the total population, but children of immigrants make up 22 percent of all children and 30 percent of low-income children in the United States.
Because most children in immigrant families were born in the United States, they are eligible for government assistance on the same basis as all other US citizens.
But as reported in a special section of the journal Child Development, they differ in the extent to which they have health insurance and use a regular health care provider.
“Noncitizen parents may be unaware of their US-born children’s eligibility for important benefits, or they may believe that seeking assistance for eligible children would hinder other family members’ efforts to obtain citizenship or legal status, or their ability to re-enter and stay in the United States,” Ziol-Guest says.
The study examined nationally representative data on more than 46,000 low-income children (younger than 18) from the 1996, 2001, 2004, and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a Census Bureau survey.
Children’s immigrant status was classified according to the status of their parents as nonpermanent residents, permanent residents, naturalized citizens, or members of a native household. The study looked at the health status of the children as reported by their mothers and at whether the children had seen a dentist or doctor in the past year.
Ariel Kalil of the University of Chicago is a co-author of the study that was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars program at Harvard University and the Young Scholar Award from the Changing Faces of America’s Children program at the Foundation for Child Development.
Source: Cornell University
Please wait
Immigration problems are simply arises in several regions; government authority is also worried about these issues; basically immigrant people are suffering from many worst issues such as lack of shelter, foods and proper health care services and the most essential term income they have the low income source that ultimately affects their economic condition. Therefore they are not able to spend enough wealth to get proper health care services.