Welfare reform and the decline in the health-insurance coverage of children of non-permanent residents

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act tightened public health-insurance coverage restrictions for non-permanent residents (NPRs) and altered the eligibility of newly permanent residents (PRs). By drawing on data from the SIPP, this paper explores to what extent welfare reform led to a decline in health-insurance coverage for children of NPRs. This paper proposes that the proportion of uninsured children of NPRs with low social economic status (SES) increased by approximately 10 percentage points relative to their PR counterparts. Furthermore, although eligible for Medicaid, citizen children of NPRs of low SES lost approximately 17 percentage points in coverage.