Medical insurance and childhood general practitioner contacts

The relationships between the duration of medical insurance coverage and rates of general practitioner consultations for morbidity were examined for a birth cohort of children studied to ten years. This showed that children from insured families had higher consultation rates even when due allowance was made for known social and economic factors correlated with the ownership of insurance. During the period from birth to five years children who were insured throughout the period made a mean of 19.16 consultations compared to 15.38 for the uninsured (p less than 0.001); during the period from five to ten years the insured made 13.07 contacts compared to 9.38 for the uninsured (p less than 0.001). The net effects of these trends were that children whose families had been insured throughout the ten year study period made a mean of nine more general practitioner consultations by the age of ten years than children from uninsured families. It is concluded that the presence of private medical insurance encourages the development of inequalities in childhood access to health care with children from insured families having greater access to care than children from uninsured families.