A new International Journal for Equity in Health published study finds many Latino children miss out on securing free or low-cost health insurance because their parents have not been made aware that they are eligible for the services.

In all, the study found more than half of all Latino and African American kids living without healthcare could be eligible for the Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

Parents Have to Sign Kids up to be Eligible

To be eligible, parents are required to sign their kids up for the program. Without any coverage at all, many already financially strapped minority families have been forced into making hardcore decisions where healthcare issues for their kids have been concerned, which have included trying to incur the cost on their own.

Some healthcare experts insist much of that is probably by design.

"It tells us that this system is not designed to keep kids on insurance," said Glenn Flores, a health-policy researcher and pediatrician at Medica Research Institute and the Mayo Clinic, who also led the study.

For the study, researchers screened more than 49,000 caregivers in the Dallas area over a three year period beginning in 2011. Over that time, they visited 97 sites in areas where low-income residents resided, looking for kids who shared the characteristics of being under the age of 18 and without healthcare; having been identified by their parents as Latino, Hispanic or African American; and were eligible for either CHIP or Medicaid.

In the end, 267 children took part in the study and 49 percent of all the parents involved insisted they were unaware that their children eligible for either Medicaid or CHIP.

At 57 percent, Latino parents were more in the dark about the program's availability than any other group.

Study Finds Many Uninsured Children Most in Need

The study also uncovered that two two-thirds of the uninsured children researchers interacted with had special health-care needs such as eczema, allergies and asthma. In addition, 40 percent of child participants had no primary source of preventive care and more than one in three of the parents had financial problems that they attributed to their kids' health.

Not much of that comes as a surprise to Genevieve Kenney, an economist who is senior fellow and co-director of the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute, who adds many parents who find themselves stuck in such precarious situations seem to feel a sense of hopelessness.

"The parents of children who are uninsured are much less likely to feel confident that their children can get the care they need," said Kenney, who also specializes in Medicaid, CHIP and health-care coverage issues. "We're learning more and more that those kinds of worries and anxieties have adverse effects on families."

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