Category: Hispanics

Parental job loss is an important trigger for a child’s loss of private health insurance.1 For example, research shows that parental loss of full-time employment doubles the odds that a child will lose private health insurance.2 Until the 1990s, substantial numbers of children lacked health insurance, but with the enactment of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in 1997, followed by changes to Medicaid and CHIP’s 2009 reauthorization, children’s health insurance coverage was expanded through broader eligibility, enrollment simplifications, and outreach efforts.3 From 1997 to 2012, the share of children without insurance fell from 14 percent to 7 percent.4 The growth of public coverage for children notwithstanding, private coverage is still the primary form of children’s health insurance. In 2014, 59 percent of children received coverage from private health insurance.5 But coverage has become less consistent for some children, due to an overall decline in employer-provided private-sector coverage, an increase in switching between public and private sources, and low public health insurance renewal rates.6 Even brief gaps in health insurance produce adverse consequences for children, including fewer medical provider visits over the course of a year, the loss of a primary health care provider, difficulty getting preventive and specialized medical care, and the increased use of emergency department and inpatient hospital visits.7 Loss of employer-based coverage leads to instability in health insurance, gaps in coverage, and more unmet health care needs.8 This brief focuses on children’s loss of private health insurance after a parent left his or her job voluntarily or involuntarily between May 2008 and the end of 2012 (see Box 1 for definitions). The number of uninsured children declined steadily throughout this period,9 and experts project that some of the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 will foster a continued decline in the percentages of children without health insurance over the long term.10 For most of the period under study, many ACA provisions that have likely served to expand coverage—the mandate that persons obtain health insurance, the state option to expand Medicaid to reach more families, the provision of federal subsidies to purchase coverage, and the ACA requirement for states to transition coverage of children up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line from CHIP to Medicaid—had not yet gone into effect. But since most children are still covered under private health insurance plans, the majority of which are linked to the parents’ employment, understanding the relationship and the characteristics of children who are unlikely to remain covered after a parent leaves his or her job may help identify ways to preserve consistency in coverage. For example, health care providers, administrators, and policy makers can keep watch to ensure that eligible children are quickly connected with public sources of coverage.

Using data from the late summer through the fall of 2021, this brief documents recent racial and income disparities in reports of inadequate access to childcare and identifies the employment-related consequences of these shortages.

In this brief, authors Kenneth Johnson and Daniel Lichter report that although population declines were widespread between 2010 and 2020, rural America became more racially and ethnically diverse.

This policy brief provides an update on the employment trends that took place between February 2020 and June 2021.

America is growing more racially and ethnically diverse,1 yet some parts of the country are far more diverse than others. Migration—the flow of people from one place to another2—influences local diversity by continually redistributing the population3 and altering the racial mix in both the sending and receiving communities. Migration can serve an integrating function when people from different races move into the same area, but it can also reinforce existing racial boundaries and diminish local diversity when people from different racial groups sort themselves into homogeneous communities. Using new data and techniques, we find that net migration between counties increased racial diversity in each of the last two decades. However, migration’s influence on diversity was far from uniform: it varied by race, age group, and region of the country, sometimes starkly. Overall, net migration of the population under age 40 increased diversity, while net migration of people over age 60 diminished diversity (see Figure 1 and Box 1).4

Two important demographic trends are reflected in newly released Census Bureau projections. The pace of U.S. population growth is slowing, and the population continues to become more diverse. These trends reflect distinctly different demographic trajectories among whites and minorities driven by the interaction of several key demographic forces. This will produce a rich tapestry of demographic change in the United States over the next several decades.

New Hampshire, with a total population of 1.3 million, gained 79,000 residents between 2000 and 2006. Most of this growth - 51,000 residents - came from migration. The migration also brought economic gains: New Hampshire gained at least $1.4 billion in income from migration between 2001 and 2005, and households moving in earned nearly $9,000 more than those leaving.

In this policy brief, authors Rogelio Sáenz and Corey Sparks discuss the wide variations in unemployment and the level of job loss during the COVID-19 pandemic across the nation’s demographic groups that have historically suffered disparities in the workforce, including persons of color, women, and immigrants. It is particularly unfortunate that the calamity of the pandemic comes on the heels of major improvements in job prospects that these groups made over the last decade, as the workforce emerged from the Great Recession.