Los Angeles Healthy Kids Improves Access to Care for Young Children

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Preliminary findings from a survey of parents with children enrolled in the Los Angeles Healthy Kids program reveal that the initiative is improving children's access to primary care and easing parents' concerns about meeting their children's health care needs.

Background

The Healthy Kids program was launched in Los Angeles County in July 2003 with funding from First 5 LA. The program aims to extend universal coverage to children in families with incomes below 300 percent of the federal poverty level by insuring children ineligible for Medi-Cal or Healthy Families. Initially designed to cover children under age 6, Healthy Kids obtained additional financing and extended eligibility to children though age 18 in May 2004. As of December 2005, 7,833 children under age 6 and 34,780 children age 6 to 18 were enrolled in Healthy Kids (Sommers et al. 2006).

Services under Healthy Kids are administered by the L.A. Care Health Plan on a prepaid capitated basis through a network that includes safety net and other providers. Benefits under the Healthy Kids program were modeled after Healthy Families, California's State Children's Health Insurance Program, and are quite comprehensive, covering preventive, primary, and specialty care as well as hospital, dental, and vision services. Families with incomes above 133 percent of the federal poverty level are required to pay a sliding scale premium and all enrollees face some co-payment at the point of service.

This brief presents preliminary results on differences in perceived and realized access to care from the initial survey of established and new enrollees that was conducted as part of the Los Angeles Healthy Kids Initiative evaluation. The Healthy Kids evaluation was designed to both provide feedback to stakeholders on the initiative and to assess the impact of the program on insurance coverage, access to care, use of services, satisfaction with care, quality and content of care, and developmental and health status for children under age 6. The evaluation includes case studies of implementation, focus groups with parents, ongoing process monitoring, and a longitudinal survey of parents of children enrolled in Healthy Kids. First 5 LA contracts with the Urban Institute and its partners—the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., and Castillo & Associates—to conduct the evaluation.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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