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Empirical Essays On Health Care For Children And Families
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Book Synopsis Empirical Essays on Health Care for Children and Families by : Zuleyha Neziroglu Cidav
Download or read book Empirical Essays on Health Care for Children and Families written by Zuleyha Neziroglu Cidav and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three empirical essays investigating different aspects of health care for children and families. The first essay examines the effectiveness of adherence to American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for preventive pediatric health care. Using a national longitudinal sample of children age two years and younger, we investigate whether compliance with prescribed periodic well-child care visits has beneficial effects on child health. We find that increased compliance improves child health. In particular, higher compliance lowers future risks of fair or poor health, of some history of a serious illness and of having a health limitation. The second essay examines child health care utilization in relation to maternal labor supply. We test the hypothesis that working-mothers trade off the advantages of greater income against the disadvantages of less time for other valuable tasks, such as seeking health care for their children. This tradeoff may result in positive, negative, or no net impacts on child health investment. We estimate health care demand regressions that include separate variables for mother's labor supply and her labor income. Our results indicate that higher maternal work hours reduce child health care visits; higher maternal earnings increase them. In addition, wage-employment, as opposed to self-employment, is detrimental to child health investment. A further finding is that preventive care demand for younger children is less sensitive to maternal time and income changes. We also find that detrimental time effects dominate beneficial income effects. The third essay studies intra-household resource allocation as it pertains to its demand for preventive medical care. We test the income-pooling hypothesis of the common preference model by using individual specific medical care consumption data and present evidence on the allocation of household resources to the medical needs of the child, husband and wife. Our results are in line with the findings of previous studies that emphasize the ongoing importance of the traditional gender role of woman as the primary caregiver. We find that the resources of the wife have a greater positive impact on child's and her own preventive care demand than does the resources of the husband. In contrast to most studies from developing countries, we find that US families do not exhibit differential health care demand based on child gender. It is also noteworthy that the wife's education level has a greater positive impact than that of her husband does on both the husband's and her own preventive care utilization.
Book Synopsis Essays on Health Insurance Coverage and Food Assistance Programs by : Daniela Zapata Sapiencia
Download or read book Essays on Health Insurance Coverage and Food Assistance Programs written by Daniela Zapata Sapiencia and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Empirical work shows that health insurance coverage improves children's health and that healthier children have better educational and labor market outcomes. This suggests that the benefits of higher insurance rates among children go beyond improvements in health. However, there are no investigations in the United States that track the long-term socioeconomic benefits of health insurance coverage during childhood. Using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate family fixed effects models, I find evidence that health insurance coverage at ages 0-4 has a positive effect on test scores in mathematics, reading recognition, reading comprehension, and vocabulary at ages 5-14. The second essay in this dissertation, co-authored with Charles Courtemanche, investigates the effect of the Massachusetts health care reform on self-reported health. The main objective of this reform was to achieve universal health insurance coverage through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, and subsidies. This reform was later used as a model for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Using individual-level data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and a difference in differences estimation strategy, this essay provides evidence that this reform led to better overall self-assessed health. Several determinants of overall health, including physical health, mental health, functional limitations, joint disorders, body mass index, and moderate physical activity also improved. Public food assistance programs share the fundamental goal of helping needy and vulnerable people in the U.S. obtain access to nutritious foods that they might not otherwise be able to afford. These programs also have other objectives, such as improving recipients' health, furthering children's development and school performance. To investigate these broader impacts, the third chapter of this dissertation, co-authored with David Ribar, examines the relationship between participation in food assistance programs, family routines and time use. Results from fixed effects models estimated using longitudinal data from the Three-City Study indicate that SNAP participation is negatively associated with homework routines. WIC participation on the other hand, is positively associated with family routines in general and with dinner routines, homework routines, and family-time routines in particular."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.
Book Synopsis Three Essays On Children's Health Care Use And Health by : Maki Ueyama
Download or read book Three Essays On Children's Health Care Use And Health written by Maki Ueyama and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early years of children's lives are crucial to their future health and development. Disparities in health and skills that emerge during children's first few years increase with age. Many factors affect children's health. At an individual level, mother's education is an influential factor. At a societal level, public policies affect children's surrounding environment that influences their health. Therefore it is critical that public policies and other determinants of children's health be studied carefully. As a nation, U.S. has made significant improvements in children's health over the past century. However, there is a significant increase in the number of children in the U.S. today that suffer from conditions and diseases that have emerged in recent years, including asthma and obesity. These conditions are impediments to children's healthy development and have long lasting effects. Investment in children's health yields long term payoffs at the individual as well as societal levels. Healthy children have more opportunities to succeed in schools and more likely to become healthy, productive adults. Benefits extend to society as a whole including reduced dependency and disability, a healthier future workforce, and consequently a stronger economy. Due to these reasons, it is important to understand how health care use and health among children in the U.S. have been affected by some of their key determinants in recent decades. This dissertation is divided into three chapters. The first chapter examines the feasibility of using compulsory schooling policies as instruments for mother's schooling to examine the causal effect of mother's schooling on children's health care use and health. The second chapter examines the causal effect of insurance coverage on children's health care use and health using evidence from the Medicaid and SCHIP expansions. The third chapter examines the causal effect of welfare reform on children's health care use and health. Findings from this dissertation provide informative insights on key factors that shape children's health and wellbeing and highlight important methodological issues involving such empirical research.
Author :Institute of Medicine and National Research Council Publisher :National Academies Press ISBN 13 :0309173930 Total Pages :216 pages Book Rating :4.3/5 (91 download)
Book Synopsis America's Children by : Institute of Medicine and National Research Council
Download or read book America's Children written by Institute of Medicine and National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1998-10-27 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's Children is a comprehensive, easy-to-read analysis of the relationship between health insurance and access to care. The book addresses three broad questions: How is children's health care currently financed? Does insurance equal access to care? How should the nation address the health needs of this vulnerable population? America's Children explores the changing role of Medicaid under managed care; state-initiated and private sector children's insurance programs; specific effects of insurance status on the care children receive; and the impact of chronic medical conditions and special health care needs. It also examines the status of "safety net" health providers, including community health centers, children's hospitals, school-based health centers, and others and reviews the changing patterns of coverage and tax policy options to increase coverage of private-sector, employer-based health insurance. In response to growing public concerns about uninsured children, last year Congress voted to provide $24 billion over five years for new state insurance initiatives. This volume will serve as a primer for concerned federal policymakers and regulators, state agency officials, health plan decisionmakers, health care providers, children's health advocates, and researchers.
Book Synopsis Essays on Children's Health and Education Policies by : Kathleen Ngar-Gee Wong
Download or read book Essays on Children's Health and Education Policies written by Kathleen Ngar-Gee Wong and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three independent research papers, which broadly focuses on the introduction and outcomes of policies concerning children's health and education. Although the chapters are related in theme, the objective, scope and empirical strategy of each paper differs. The first chapter, "How Did SCHIP Affect the Insurance Coverage of Immigrants Children?" (with Thomas Buchmueller and Anthony Lo Sasso), focuses on the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in the late 1990s, which expanded public insurance eligibility and coverage for children in "working poor families". Despite this success, over 6 million children are eligible for public insurance, but remain uninsured. The study focuses on children born to immigrant parents because of their low rates of insurance coverage and unique enrollment barriers. The results indicate SCHIP was successful in increasing overall insurance take-up and in reducing disparities in access to health insurance coverage. The second chapter, "Looking Beyond Test Score Gains" determines whether the introduction of school accountability programs (prior to the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001) affected individuals' educational attainment and labor market outcomes. The effects are evaluated along two dimensions: differences in the length of program exposure and variation in program quality. The results indicate school accountability had mixed success in increasing outcomes across gender and racial/ethnic groups. They also suggest the heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with some of the unintended consequences documented in the school accountability literature. The third chapter, "The Role of Education on Health Behaviors, Investments and Outcomes", uses a new combination of instrumental variables to predict individuals' schooling and determine whether there is a causal effect of education on young adults' health behaviors. The instruments rely on changes to state policies, dating back to the 1970s, that dictate when children are permitted to start and stop attending school. The results indicate education not only decreases the likelihood of smoking, heavy drinking and obesity, but affects the frequency of these behaviors and degree of obesity. Education also promotes behaviors that are akin to health investments, such as increasing sunscreen use and the receipt of preventive services.
Book Synopsis Children and Youth in Sickness and in Health by : Janet Golden
Download or read book Children and Youth in Sickness and in Health written by Janet Golden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six original essays reflect the growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood and youth, particularly issues affecting child health and welfare. These important new essays show how changing patterns of health and disease have responded to and shaped notions of childhood and adolescence as life stages. Until the early 20th century, life-threatening illnesses were a sinister presence in the lives of children of all social classes. Today, many diseases and threats to child health have been eliminated or alleviated. Yet critical problems remain. New threats such as AIDS and violence take a steady toll. Child health remains an active concern for all families. Despite the development of health care policies, social welfare policies, and effective medication, the home remains—as it was in the Colonial period—the most critical site of care. Parents are still central to the preservation of children's health. This work imposes a holistic view of this experience for children and families. By examining the child's perspective of illness, the authors make an important contribution to the understanding of illness as part of the developmental process of growing up.
Book Synopsis Human Capital Policy by : Aysun Aygü̈n
Download or read book Human Capital Policy written by Aysun Aygü̈n and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1: Vaccination Effects of Family Medicine in Turkey. As a component of the Health Transformation Program reforms, the family medicine system was introduced in Turkey as the main source of primary care. With a gradual implementation process, provinces switched to the family medicine system at different points in time between 2005 and 2010. Using a nationally representative survey of health care service utilization and outcomes for maternal and child-care services, we test whether on-time vaccination rates for children under age two are causally affected by access to family medicine centers and health care workers. A regression discontinuity design shows that availability of family medicine doctors significantly increases on-time application of vaccinations in the national infant immunization program. Specifically, we find that access to family medicine centers increases on-time vaccination rates for the follow-up shots. Chapter 2: Child Care Regulations and Demand for Formal Child Care. Formal child care centers are licensed and regulated by state governments. Both the stringency of regulations and the price of paid child care show great variability across states. Strict regulations often come with high prices for paid child care, making regulated child care unaffordable for families. Using changes in regulations for different states over time and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this study shows that strict regulations affect use of regulated care by decreasing the number of formal care providers without a direct impact on price. Based on the estimation results, I conclude that demand for formal care is highly elastic and informal child care arrangements are close substitutes for formal care for consumers. Strict regulations create an incentive to substitute informal types of child care for center-based organized care. Chapter 3: Social Norms and Women in the Labor Force. Social norms and gender roles are argued to shape the prevalent gap in labor force participation of men and women in developed countries. This study aims to understand whether female labor force participation is affected by social norms by using the election of female senators and governors as a possible cause of norms that support working women. Using regression discontinuity design with the election data for U.S. Senate and state governors, I estimate the relative change in women's labor force participation after a woman wins the Senate seat or governor's office by a narrow margin of victory. Consistent with the literature, my estimation results do not provide evidence to reject the null hypotheses of no demonstration effect of female senators and governors on labor force participation of women.
Book Synopsis Empirical Essays in Family Structure and Early Child Outcomes by : Terry-Ann L. Craigie
Download or read book Empirical Essays in Family Structure and Early Child Outcomes written by Terry-Ann L. Craigie and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Three Essays on Health Economics by : Archita Banik
Download or read book Three Essays on Health Economics written by Archita Banik and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Essays on Health, Family, and Work Choices by : Joelle Abramowitz
Download or read book Essays on Health, Family, and Work Choices written by Joelle Abramowitz and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates how changes in policies, technology, and lifestyles affect individual's decisions about their health, well-being, and life choices. The dissertation primarily focuses on two questions within this topic: i) the effects of greater affordability of assisted reproductive technology (ART) on women's marriage and fertility timing decisions and ii) the effects of time spent working on individual's obesity and health status and the mechanisms contributing to these effects. In two chapters, I examine whether greater affordability of ART has impacted women's fertility and marriage choices. ART consists of medical technologies that help women and couples with fertility problems conceive a child using such methods as in-vitro fertilization (IVF). Since the percentage of women facing infertility increases greatly with age, by making it affordable for women to delay family formation and then use ART to start families later if they face infertility, greater affordability of ART could induce women to delay marriage and childbearing. To formally identify channels through which greater affordability of ART might impact women's decisions about timing of family, I develop theoretical models of greater affordability of ART and women's allocation of time on work and family investment over the life course. To test the implications of the models, I utilize empirical strategies exploiting variation in the mandated insurance coverage of ART across U.S. states and over time. In the first chapter, I use linear probability models and the 1977-2010 Current Population Survey to examine the likelihood that women of different ages with and without mandated insurance coverage of ART have ever been married in order to compute marriage rates between age groups, the differences in the likelihoods of having ever been married between one age group and the next. Results show that greater access to ART is associated with marital delay for white (but not for black) women. In the second chapter, to estimate a more precise analysis and examine channels for the effects on marriage, I perform survival and competing risks analyses using the 1986-2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the effects of the mandates on the hazards of transitioning to first marriage and first birth for single and childless women, respectively. The findings of this research suggest that the mandates are associated with delayed marriage and childbearing at younger ages and speeded transition to marriage and motherhood after age 30, but only for college graduate women, consistent with the theoretical framework's prediction that women with steeper wage trajectories should be more influenced by the mandates to delay family formation. For the full sample of women, the mandates appear to be associated with speeded transition to marriage after age 25 and motherhood within marriage after age 30, but not with delay at younger ages. This research builds on the literature examining changes in women's marriage and fertility timing and on the literature investigating the effects of ART insurance mandates. This research is valuable for understanding the impacts of technology and policy as well as the factors impacting women's marriage and fertility timing. In the third chapter, I investigate mechanisms for the positive relationship between time spent working and Body Mass Index (BMI). BMI might increase and health status might decline with more hours spent working since as leisure time declines, the opportunity cost of time rises, and it becomes more costly to undertake health-producing activities and receive medical care. Additionally, more time spent working would increase the incidence of detrimental effects of the workplace such as job-related stress, which would have a negative effect on health. This chapter uses the 2006, 2007, and 2008 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) linked with Eating and Health module data to identify channels through which time spent working could affect BMI. While other datasets provide information on individuals' market work time, the ATUS also provides insight into individuals' non-market work activities. Linked with the Eating and Health module, it permits inference to be drawn about individuals' time use in a variety of activities as well as measures relating to eating and health, including BMI. Making use of this data, in this chapter I first replicate the results of other papers by estimating the effect of working time on BMI and find that increased working time is associated with a positive and significant effect on own BMI for both men and women. Then, to investigate the channels through which working time may impact BMI, I next estimate a series of equations to determine whether a variety of potential mediators significantly change the estimated effect of time spent working on own BMI. A number of the tested channels appear to mediate the effect of hours worked on BMI with strong significant effects found for exercise, active time, and screen time, and marginally significant effects found for secondary eating and food preparation. No significant effects were found for primary eating, secondary drinking, grocery shopping, purchasing prepared food, sleeping, housework, commuting, or own medical care. These results suggest the main channels through which working hours could be related to BMI are related to physical activity. These findings suggest plausible mechanisms for the association between time spent working and obesity. This work contributes to the literature by using time use data to examine the effect of time spent working on BMI as well as by modeling the channels through which time use affects weight and health outcomes. While previous work has explored the effect of working time on BMI, this paper considers the effect of working time on various measures of time use to get a fuller picture of how work time affects lifestyle choices that affect weight and health. This is valuable because recent research has found that there is a growing disparity in working hours between Americans and those in other industrialized countries, and the full consequences of increasing working hours are not explored in the literature and can have significant implications for labor and tax policy. Further, to prescribe effective policy interventions, it is necessary to know the channels through which any effects are arising. This work contributes to the literature by investigating the potential eating, health investment, and physical activity channels driving the positive relationship between working time and BMI to obtain a fuller picture of how work time affects lifestyle choices that affect weight and health. This is valuable because as Americans transition to more sedentary jobs, the full consequences of increased work hours in those jobs are not explored in the literature and can have significant implications for labor and tax policy. Accordingly, the paper provides insights useful for designing effective policy interventions aiming to reduce obesity prevalence. This research has examined questions related to individuals' health and life choices with relevant policy implications. Recent decades have seen significant changes in the roles of and opportunities for women and associated changes in lifestyle and the family, and this dissertation explores the effects of these changes. The findings of this research suggest that women have responded to lower prices of infertility treatment with higher educated women delaying marriage and child bearing, and it could be the case that these invest more time when younger in education and work. In addition, the research suggests that increased time spent working may be associated with an increase in BMI driven by allocating less time to physical activity. These results suggest that changes in technology and lifestyle over recent decades have had real effects on individuals' life choices and health.
Book Synopsis Dissertation Abstracts International by :
Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Essays in children's access to health care by : Sean Michael Orzol
Download or read book Essays in children's access to health care written by Sean Michael Orzol and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Essays in Health and Development Economics by : Reshmaan Nahar Hussam
Download or read book Essays in Health and Development Economics written by Reshmaan Nahar Hussam and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is a compilation of three empirical studies exploring significant but underexamined health and development challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in South Asia. Chapter One investigates the effects of the expansion of ultrasound technology throughout India in the 1980s on the childbearing decisions of parents and the marriage market dynamics of exposed children. While ample work has documented the relationship between access to sex selection technology and heavily male-skewed child sex ratios, we know little about how such exposure translates into later life marriage market outcomes of children in highly sex-skewed regions, nor about how parental choice regarding sex selection is affected by such shifts in their children's marital prospects. I build on a theory proposed by Edlund (1999) that, in environments where hypergamy is practiced and parents derive utility from married children, a male-skewed sex ratio can generate a permanent female underclass. By examining the relationship between the child sex ratio of couples of childbearing age and that of their contemporaneous marriage market, I offer evidence that parents do indeed internalize the marriage prospects of their unborn children and adjust their use of sex selection technology accordingly. Importantly, this adjustment occurs significantly more amongst poor families than wealthy families. By exploiting spatial and temporal variation in exposure to ultrasound technology, I then examine the implications of such socioeconomically skewed ultrasound use on the marital outcomes of children in regions with high ultrasound access. I find that, relative to her unexposed counterpart, the average exposed married female has significantly poorer health and less education; there exists a wider marriage and education gap between herself and her husband; and she reports lower autonomy, less decision making power, and more abuse, among other bargaining outcomes. While existing literature suggests that scarcity of females in a marriage market should increase their bargaining power, I offer evidence to the contrary in this nationwide setting of endogenous and socioeconomically stratified sex selection. This exercise underscores the intergenerational welfare consequences of poorly regulated access to sex selection technology: not only upon the millions of 'missing women' lost to sex selection, but upon surviving females as well. Chapter Two explores the impact of a 1999 public health campaign in Bangladesh, which sought to protect millions of individuals from exposure to arsenic-contaminated water, on infant and child mortality. The study was motivated by the dearth of literature on the effects of arsenic exposure on children (whereas its effects on adults, often manifested in the cancer arsenicosis, are well known). It quickly evolved into an examination of the unintended consequences of a highly influential but poorly planned public health campaign. Exploiting the local random nature of arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh, paired with the timing of child births and thus exposure to such contaminated water, we find that households in which children were exposed to arsenic for a shorter duration (because the household responded to the health campaign by switching away from arsenic-contaminated groundwater sources) in fact experience significantly higher rates of infant and child mortality relative to their counterparts. We present evidence that this unanticipated rise in mortality is due to the quality of alternatives that a switching household faced: households had to choose between arsenic-laden but easily accessible shallow tubewell water, which was protected from fecal bacteria; arsenic-free and easily accessible surface water, which was heavily exposed to fecal bacteria; or distant and inconvenient potable water, which was more likely to be exposed to bacteria at the point-of-use. As bacterial contamination is a leading cause of infant and child death in Bangladesh, we argue through a series of exercises that this is a likely driver of the rise in mortality rates amongst young children whose families switched away from arsenic-contaminated tubewells. In determining their water source, households were essentially trading off arsenic exposure and the resulting rise in old-age mortality with bacterial exposure and the resulting rise in the mortality of their young. The study motivates caution in the execution of large-scale public health and behavioral change campaigns when alternatives to the discouraged behavior are poorly understood. While my first two chapters investigate household health behavior, a demand-side component of the healthcare market, the next chapter explores a critical player on the supply side. Chapter Three studies the impact of a nine-month generalized training program on the knowledge and performance of private informal healthcare providers in West Bengal, India. These providers, colloquially referred to as "quacks" and described here as "informal providers" (IPs), constitute nearly 80% of the Indian healthcare provider market. However, none possess medical degrees and few have any formal certification to practice medicine. They have been the focus of considerable debate in recent years, with many pushing for their elimination while others propose their integration into the public healthcare system. To inform the debate, it is important to understand whether the quality of healthcare provided by IPs can be improved sufficiently for effective and welfare-increasing integration. The training program examined in this study was the first of its kind to be rigorously evaluated for its impact on IP knowledge and quality of care. We employ a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design, in which we randomly assigned 152 IPs to treatment and 152 IPs to control. Treatment IPs were invited to attend the program, which was taught by certified doctors and consisted of two two-hour classes per week over nine months. Endline data was collected twelve to fourteen months after the start of training. Standardized patient data, corroborated by clinical observations, demonstrate that those IPs offered the program spent significantly more time with their patients, completed a more thorough set of history questions and examinations, and provided more effective treatments. However, we see no shift in the frequency with which they practiced polypharmacy nor the dispensation of unnecessary antibiotics, two harmful practices which plague both the private and public healthcare system. We conclude that training offers a low cost, highly effective method to improve the quality of care delivered by IPs, but that deeper knowledge failures or misaligned incentives may be driving practices such as polypharmacy, for which training may not be a sufficiently powerful intervention.
Author :National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Publisher :National Academies Press ISBN 13 :0309452961 Total Pages :583 pages Book Rating :4.3/5 (94 download)
Book Synopsis Communities in Action by : National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Book Synopsis Essays on the Empirical Modelling of the Determinants of Health and Lifestyle by : Laure de Preux Gallone
Download or read book Essays on the Empirical Modelling of the Determinants of Health and Lifestyle written by Laure de Preux Gallone and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis comprises two essays in health economics. The first examines the impact of health insurance on lifestyle. The ex ante moral hazard (EAMH) postulates that health insurance reduces prevention effort (healthy lifestyle) since the cost of ill health to the insured individual is reduced. There is little evidence to support this hypothesis. I extend the standard model of EAMH by allowing for the fact that the consequences of a more healthy current lifestyle take some time to affect health. This extended model predicts that anticipated future insurance can alter current behaviour. I test this prediction by using as a natural experiment the granting of Medicare at age 65 to all individuals, including the large proportion who have no insurance when under age 65. I first use classical parametric and semi-parametric empirical methods. Then, these methods are combined into a more robust estimator to compare the changes in lifestyle between ages 59 and 68 for individuals with different amounts of insurance before age 65. The results suggest reductions in physical activity by the uninsured two years before being covered by Medicare. Anticipation of Medicare has no effect on alcohol consumption or smoking behaviour. The second essay investigates the role of maternal parenting style on child health. The analysis is innovative in using econometric methods that allow for possible biases arising from unobservable family circumstances and from parenting style being influenced also by child health. Using two waves from the Millennium Cohort Study I also develop a set of measures of parenting style and allow for potential reporting bias and for the role of the father. I find that maternal parenting style mainly influences the mental health of the child, rather than the physical health. Parenting style and socio-economic factors do not appear to interact in their effect on child health.
Book Synopsis Children's Health, the Nation's Wealth by : Institute of Medicine
Download or read book Children's Health, the Nation's Wealth written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2004-10-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children's health has clearly improved over the past several decades. Significant and positive gains have been made in lowering rates of infant mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases and accidental causes, improved access to health care, and reduction in the effects of environmental contaminants such as lead. Yet major questions still remain about how to assess the status of children's health, what factors should be monitored, and the appropriate measurement tools that should be used. Children's Health, the Nation's Wealth: Assessing and Improving Child Health provides a detailed examination of the information about children's health that is needed to help policy makers and program providers at the federal, state, and local levels. In order to improve children's health-and, thus, the health of future generations-it is critical to have data that can be used to assess both current conditions and possible future threats to children's health. This compelling book describes what is known about the health of children and what is needed to expand the knowledge. By strategically improving the health of children, we ensure healthier future generations to come.
Author :National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Publisher :National Academies Press ISBN 13 :0309388570 Total Pages :525 pages Book Rating :4.3/5 (93 download)
Book Synopsis Parenting Matters by : National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Download or read book Parenting Matters written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.
