TY - JOUR AU - Corman,Hope AU - Carroll,Anne AU - Noonan,Kelly AU - Reichman,Nancy E. TI - The Effects of Health on Health Insurance Status in Fragile Families JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 12197 PY - 2006 Y2 - May 2006 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12197 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12197.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Hope Corman Rider University 2083 Lawrenceville Road Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 Tel: 609/895-5559 Fax: 609/896-5387 E-Mail: corman@rider.edu Kelly Noonan Department of Economics Rider University 2083 Lawrence Road, Room SWG 306 Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 Tel: 609/895-5539 E-Mail: knoonan@rider.edu Nancy Reichman Robert Wood Johnson Medical School University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey 97 Paterson St., Room 435 New Brunswick, NJ 08903 E-Mail: reichmne@umdnj.edu M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2006-05-08 AB - We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study to estimate the effects of poor infant health, pre-pregnancy health conditions of the mother, and the father's health status on health insurance status of urban, mostly unmarried, mothers and their one-year-old children. Virtually all births were covered by health insurance, but one year later about one third of mothers and over 10 percent of children were uninsured. We separately examine births that were covered by public insurance and those that were covered by private insurance. The child's health status had no effect, for the most part, on whether the mother or child became uninsured. For publicly insured births, a maternal physical health condition made it less likely that both the mother and child became uninsured, while maternal mental illness made it more likely that both the mother and child lost insurance coverage. For privately insured births, the father's suboptimal physical health made it more likely that the mother, but not the child, became uninsured. ER -