Preventive Healthcare Usage in the United States: Does Health Insurance Matter

The Centers for Disease Control in the United States has maintained that adults who avoid preventive care services are more likely to suffer from long term chronic diseases because they are not addressed or treated in a timely manner. Examining the effects of providing access to healthcare to uninsured adults and increasing preventive services can help in reducing chronic diseases and enable adults to live longer, healthier lives. The purpose of this study was to identify the relationship between the utilization of preventive health services and socioeconomic factors such as insurance status, race/ethnicity, household income, marital status, education, gender, age, source of usual care, and perceived health status in the United States. Using Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data from the year 2015, this study presents logistic regression estimates of the odds ratios for each independent variable in the context of utilization of four different types of preventive care services: cancer screenings, hypertension screenings, cholesterol screenings, and physical checkups. Separate estimates of these models are also obtained for the insured and uninsured sub-samples to identify if there are statistical variations based upon access to health insurance. These estimates offer insights into the association between lack of health insurance and the influences of other socioeconomic characteristics with utilization of various preventive health care services. The intent of this research is to present a comprehensive analysis of usage of preventive care services and to identify which socioeconomic characteristics should be targeted by policies in order to ensure improved access to and use of preventive care services in the population. We find that targeted policies that improve access to preventive care by lowering costs of preventive care services by improving access to health insurance would allow for early diagnosis and possible prevention of chronic diseases among more people, leading to better health outcomes for the whole nation