Declining Rate of Vaccination of Children Covered by Private Health Insurance

The National Committee for Quality Assurance in its State of Health Care 2010 report notes that there is a decline in the vaccination rate of children covered by private health insurance by almost four per cent while vaccination of children enrolled in Medicaid programs actually increased.  NCQA report shows that multiple childern vaccinations prevent some 10.5 million diseases per birth cohort in the US and saves in direct and indirect health care costs.

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NCQA speculates that parents of children with private insurance delay or decline vaccination of their children in the unproven notion that vaccinations cause autism spectrum disease.  The report notes that this thinking is fostered especially through internet articles and celebrity endorsement. Parents in private health insurance plans who are generally well educated tend to overvalue this misinformation regarding the relationship between vaccination and autism and predicts that if the trend continues, in the long run, these children of the middle class may be less healthy than children in Medicaid health insurance plans.

NCQA Report on Health Insurance Plans

The National Committee for Quality Assurance, a private non profit organization, the most recognized agency that monitors health care in the US just released its State of Health Care Quality report on October 13, 2010.  This is the annual report on the quality of health care in America. The interesting finding is that "health plans that spend the most on care don’t always deliver the best quality." 

The analysis used the interphase between relative resource use (RRU), an indicator of health services utilization (e.g. doctor visits and hospitalizations) with the outcomes for five common costly chronic diseases  and comparison between different health insurance plans within the same region and within similar members. It found that the outcome was not necessarily better with health insurance plans that utilized more services and spent more.


A relevant follow-up might be to study the factors that produce better outcomes in these chronic diseases given that more dollars spent does not insure better results.  I would wager that lifestyle changes and individual responsibility for ones health will prove to be significant factors.