Study: It's Harder to Get Medical Care If You're a Kid on Medicaid in Chicago

Study: It's Harder to Get Medical Care If You're a Kid on Medicaid in Chicago

Yesterday the New England Journal of Medicine published a study entitled "Auditing Access to Specialty Care for Children with Public Insurance." While it's well established that families on public medical programs face many theoretical barriers to receiving medical care—language, literacy, and so forth—the purpose of the study was to eliminate all but one question: how hard is it to get in the door if you're on Medicaid or CHIP, even if you have all your ducks in a row: "research on children's access to specialty care has not adequately distinguished between provider-related barriers and patient-related ones."