Hispanic Children Least Likely to Have Health Insurance: Citizenship, Ethnicity, and Language Barriers to Coverage

This policy brief examines health insurance coverage of Hispanic children and its relationship to their citizenship status, their parents’ citizenship status, parents’ insurance coverage, language spoken at home, and their state’s Medicaid expansion policies. Using the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey collected in 2014, authors Michael Staley and Jessica Carson report that Hispanic children are less likely to have health insurance than black or white children, a gap that is explained by differences in citizenship status between Hispanic and non-Hispanic children. Noncitizen Hispanic children are nearly three times more likely to be uninsured than Hispanic citizen children living with citizen parents and more than three times more likely to be uninsured than citizen children living with noncitizen parents. Hispanic children who do not have an insured parent are seven times more likely to be uninsured than Hispanic children with at least one insured parent. In conclusion, they suggest policy considerations that might incrementally reduce the number of uninsured children

A Nested Logit Model of Recreational Fishing Demand in Alaska

Travel cost analysis, bioeconomic modeling, Public Economics, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Q26, Q22, C35,

The Contribution of Blood Serum Biomarkers to the Prediction of Cognitive Decline by fMRI and Apolipoprotein-E in Healthy Older Adults

Biomarkers are a promising approach to the prediction and early intervention of Alzheimer\u27s disease. We demonstrated that cortical functional MRI (fMRI) activation during a semantic memory task and apolipoprotein-E ?4 allele inheritance (APOE?4) effectively predicted cognitive decline after 18-months in healthy, asymptomatic elders. Hippocampal volume added modest prediction, while AD family history and demographics were ineffective. Previous studies have linked plasma homocysteine (tHcy), vitamin B12 and creatinine values to cognitive funcitoning, cortical atrophy, hippocampal atrophy and neuropathology, and vascular integrity. Here we incorporated total plasma homocysteine (tHcy), B12 creatinine values into our previous predictive models. Of 78 healthy elders, 27 (34.6%) exhibited significant cognitive decline after 18-months. tHcy, but not B12 or creatinine, was marginally positively correlated with cortical semantic memory fMRI activation, particularly in stable participants. Logistic regression showed that tHcy, when added to APOE?4 and cortical fMRI, was a significant predictor of outcome and strengthed the already significant model (p = .007; C = .80 and R2 = .37). However, control for B12 and creatinine covariates diminished tHcy as a predictor (p = .084), though the model was still stronger than without this factor (C = .78 and R = 31). tHcy did not significantly interact with APOE?4, as has previously been reported. Neither B12 nor creatinine was similarly effective as a predictor. These results suggest that commonly investigated blood serum biomarkers are at best weakly associated with predicting age- and dementia-related cognitive decline in healthy, asymptomatic elders. fMRI and APOE?4 presently provided the best predictive model