ST LOUIS, MO – A recent study has found that families with similar demographics and children with special needs have different out-of-pocket health expenditures depending on the state in which they live.
Therapies, rehabilitation and specialty medical care are just a few of the extra costs that parents face when raising children with special needs.
“This is one of the few studies that focuses on families’ costs when caring for children with special needs, rather than the overall cost for society as a whole,” said author Paul T. Shattuck, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.
The study’s authors ranked all 50 states and the District of Columbia, using survey data from 2000 and 2001, in terms of the average percentage of special needs families that take on additional financial burden, the yearly average extra costs for those families and the size of these costs relative to family income.
“The overall percentage of U.S. families caring for children with special needs that experience an added financial burden was 91.2 percent,” Shattuck said. “This group faced average extra out-of-pocket care costs of $774 per year for expenses related to their child’s special needs.”
Wealthier states tend to have a smaller proportion of families facing a financial burden and a lower average extra cost for caring for a child with special needs, according to Shattuck and co-author Susan L. Parish, an assistant professor of social work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“At the low end, families in Massachusetts paid an average of $560 for out-of-pocket medical expenses,” Shattuck said. “At the high end, families in Georgia shouldered an average of $970 in additional care expenses.”
According to the rankings table, 86.11 percent of families with disabled children have extra out-of-pocket costs in Michigan, while 94.24 percent of families in Mississippi deal with the same situation.
“The study shows that programs like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) may not be going far enough to help families with children with special needs,” said Parish. “We need to revisit how to give appropriate support to poorer states where families, on average, have less income but are experiencing greater financial burden compared with families of similar means in wealthier states.”
Data was collected for the study via a national telephone survey of households with children who have special healthcare needs.