Outcomes for Children with Asthma on Medicaid: Elucidating Key Determinants at the Policy, Plan, Neighborhood, and Person Levels to Address Disparities.

Despite significant advances in asthma treatment, improvements in key asthma-related child outcomes, such as ED visit and mortality rates, have stalled, and disparities persist across racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The majority of five million U.S. children who suffer from asthma, a chronic condition that causes impaired quality of life, disability, and death, rely on Medicaid program to access health care. In the proposed training and research plans, I will use natural experiments to investigate the benefits Medicaid managed care plans provide for children with asthma, their relative effects on children’s health and well-being, specifically focusing on the role of relevant individual, family, and neighborhood factors by linking individual and geographic-level administrative data sets across multiple state agencies.