The Importance of Preventative Care for Health

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As a result of the importance placed on preventive services there is no shortage of studies examining preventive service utilization among various groups. Many studies have examined the factors affecting preventive service use with the most important including age5,6, race/ethnicity7-10, marital status11, and income. 6-8,11-13 The literature has documented disparities by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status in use of preventive services and shown that minorities are generally not as likely as Whites to receive services such as blood pressure checks, cervical cancer screening, and blood cholesterol screening. 14 Other studies have looked at the effects of education 9,15,16, usual source of care 15, and insurance 17-20 on the utilization of preventive services. While still other studies have sought to explore the role of health status 15, health beliefs 19, region of United States and whether a person lives in an urban or rural environment. 8 Less is known, however, about how differences in the use of preventive services vary across subgroups of the uninsured population. As a whole, the uninsured receive less preventive care. When issues are discovered it is typically at more advanced disease stages, and once a diagnosis is received, the uninsured tend to receive less therapeutic care. 21 The uninsured population is not monolithic and spans all levels of household income, education, and age. Even though there has been a large amount of information created by work on preventive services, a gap remains in the literature. According to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), an estimated 48.6 million people were uninsured in 2011. This figur... ... middle of paper ... ...tion to lower odds (OR=0.60) of being vaccinated in accordance with guidelines – those in the near poor category were had higher odds while those in the high income group had lower odds. Stratified results also revealed that Hispanics with incomes between 100% and 400% FPL had higher odds of a routine physical exam while those below 100% and above 400% FPL were not significantly different from Whites. African Americans in the middle of the income spectrum had higher odds of receiving blood pressure checks than whites of Hispanics. However, African Americans with either low or high incomes were not significantly different from Whites with low and high incomes. Hispanics followed a similar trend of rising odds for those between 100% and 400% FPL. Hispanic individuals in the lowest and highest income groups had lower odds of blood pressure checks as compared to Whites.

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