Low Income Women\'s Health Insurance

¶ … Instability

The Cost of Instability

Access to health insurance has become a major issue in America and Elizabeth Legerski, in her article titled "The Cost of Instability: The Effects of Family, Work, and Welfare Change on Low-Income Women's Health Insurance Status" discusses the effect of being a low-income woman in relation to their access to health insurance. In her research Legerski used what she called a "secondary analysis of three waves of data from the Welfare, Children, and Families Project" A Three-City Study using a series of multinomial logistic regression models." (Legerski, 2012, p.644) This means she conducted no actual research herself but analyzed the data that was collected from another study to use for hers. The research study that Legerski used collected data from low-income families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio over a period of time. The data was collected through surveys given to the family's primary female caregiver in 1999, 2001, and 2005.

The data collected from the original study was analyzed by Legerski to study access to health insurance by low-income women over a period of time. Most studies on access to health insurance do not take into account that a person's situation often changes over time affecting their access. Legerski studied the data already collected, analyzed it using a number of statistical tools, and made conclusion based on that analysis. Legerski's conclusions include that fact that access to health insurance is often predicated on stable employment, something that low-income women do not often possess. Because these women often have unstable employment and opportunities, primarily taking employment where and when it is available, their access to health insurance is limited. Added to the fact that these women, in their attempt to support their families, often make too much money to qualify for government assistance in the form of Medicare, these women are far too likely to slip through the cracks and have no real access to the health care system. A system that Legerski states "is particularly inadequate at addressing the complexity of women's lives…" (Legerski, 2012, p.652)

As the study of the dynamics of a society and social interaction, when an entire subgroup of a society is denied adequate health care,, the field of Sociology begs the question of how interactions within that society can allow something like this to happen. Legerski's article attempts to use sociological analysis to answer that question and comes to the conclusion that the health care system currently in place is not able to adequately cover the health concerns of everyone in society. This allows her to draw the conclusion that the current system is desperately in need of reform in order to address the problems uncovered in her analysis.