Health Perpetuation: The impact of parent region of born on children use of health care and health status

Children of immigrants have received increasing attention in recent years because first and second generation children of immigrant families are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. This paper addresses the relationship between child access to and use of health services, and perceived health, and parental nativity after controlling for enabling, predisposing and need variables discussed in the literature. Even though socioeconomic variability and background cannot entirely explain health differences across children, it is important to know the intergenerational effects of health inequalities among different groups. Using data from from the Integrated Health Interview Series from 2000 to 2009, I analyze the hypothesis that children of immigrants would perpetuate their parents’ health outcomes compared to children of natives by having lower health service utilization and lacking a usual place of care. Therefore, the issue on children of immigrant families health outcomes is not only one of access to care but also of how to actively incorporate these groups of parents into the health system so their kids would have better outcomes. Targeting the question of nativity would allow me to evaluate this matching outcomes almost completely ignored by the health and immigration literature.