State estimates of uninsured children

About twelve million American children lack health insurance. Attempts to assess the effectiveness of Medicaid expansions and other reforms are hampered by the lack of reliable state-level data on this population. This DataWatch presents baseline statistics on the insurance status of children, based on the Current Population Surveys from 1988, 1989, and 1990. The study finds the sharpest increase in uninsured rates from 1987 to 1989 among middle-class children and among children ages seven to twenty-one, suggesting that expanding Medicaid will fail to reach a large portion of the population at greatest risk.