The Urban Institute
April 2003
Does the Health Care Safety Net Narrow the Access Gap?
By Brenda C. Spillman, Stephen Zuckerman & Bowen Garrett
The empirical results in this paper find little variation in utilization and access among low- income adults by local safety net conditions, but very large differences by insurance status, after controlling for several individual demographic characteristics. In addition, use and access differences between insured and uninsured adults were found to have relatively little relation to local safety net conditions. These results suggest that expanding insurance coverage would be a more effective tool for increasing access to health care among low-income adults than expanding the safety net.
In other respects as well, the safety net is not a substitute for insurance, since insurance coverage confers greater access to the full range of health care providers. As noted earlier, the limited capacity of specialized safety net providers makes it inevitable that improving access requires participation of all providers as well as support for safety net providers. A recent study based on a survey of medical directors of community health centers found that while they generally reported confidence in their ability to provide needed primary care to all of their patients, they reported far greater obstacles in helping their uninsured patients obtain additional services their clinics could not provide.
Our findings suggest that expanded direct support for key safety net facilities, such as the increased support for community health centers in the Bush administration’s budget proposal, is unlikely to be an effective policy tool for narrowing access and utilization gaps between the insured and the uninsured.
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/310668_DP03-02.pdf
Comment: Safety net institutions are extremely important, but comprehensive health insurance is essential. Current innovative private health insurance products that provide flexibility in benefits and cost-sharing actually threaten affordability of care, and thereby may fail to adequately reduce access and utilization gaps. It is unlikely that the management of the private health plans would make the same effort to close these gaps as would the public administrators of a program of social insurance.