Implications of Mental Illness and Nativity for Labor Market Participation and Health Insurance Outcomes
- Presenter:
Chair: Ching-to Albert Ma; Discussant: Haiden Huskamp Tue June 6, 2006 13:45-15:15 Room 313
Some research indicates worse socioeconomic status and labor market outcomes for the mentally ill persons due to factors such as lower human capital, income, and fragmented labor market participation. Nevertheless, there is little research on the relationship between mental illness and nativity, vis-à-vis labor market and health insurance outcomes. The diversity, size, and permanence of the immigrant population in the U.S. call for an increased understanding of how mental illness may affect immigrant adults’ connections to the labor market as well their access to both public and private sources of health insurance coverage. We examine health insurance coverage since unmet need for mental health conditions is high in the U.S., and also related to financial factors. Overall, immigrants have high uninsured rates, a situation that poses challenges to receipt of timely and affordable health and mental health services. This research pools data from the nationally representative 2001 and 2002 National Survey on Drug Use and Health and focuses on non-elderly working adults ages 18-64. The unweighted sample includes 61,418 U.S.-born and 8,528 foreign-born adults, of whom 635 meet DSM-IV criteria for Serious Mental Illness. We examine sociodemographic and employment characteristics of adults stratifying by mental health status and nativity, and use both descriptive and multivariate logistic regression analyses. Preliminary findings from logistic regression models suggest that mentally ill immigrant adults exhibit similar total involvement in the labor market as a healthy, native-born control group, even after controlling for demographic, human capital, and time-cost factors. In contrast, native-born adults with serious mental illness are more likely to be out of the labor market than healthy natives. Differences in the unadjusted rates of disability between foreign and native-born adults with serious mental illness are also evident. Unadjusted rates of health insurance coverage demonstrate that foreign-born persons, both with and without serious mental illness, are highly vulnerable to being uninsured. The proportion of uninsured persons is similar in both immigrant groups. There is a slightly higher rate of access to public coverage, though, among mentally ill immigrants. Findings from this research especially have implications for policy discussions relating to the provision of public coverage and public policy formulation as these affect vulnerable populations, including immigrants and their families.
