USE OF MEDICAL-CARE BY AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND WHITE OLDER PERSONS - COMPARATIVE-ANALYSIS OF 3 NATIONAL DATA SETS

Historically, there has been a large gap between African Americans and Whites in access to health care, but this gap was ostensibly lessened by the advent of Medicare and Medicaid for older adults in the mid I9 60s. The extent to which older African Americans continue to receive l ess access to medical care as a result of economic inequalities, insti tutionalized forms of discrimination, and life-style factors remains a subject of policy debate, Empirical enquiry has produced inconsistent results. The purpose of this study is to test the same set of models of medical use using identically measured predictor variables in three nationally representative data sets of older Americans: 1984 Study of Aging (SOA); 1984 National Long-Term Care Survey (NLTC); and the 1987 National Medical Care Expenditure Survey (NMES). Multivariate logisti c regression of use of physician and hospital services and Poisson reg ression of amount of service use identified inconsistent results in ra ce differences across data sets, but consistent results in terms of th e importance of health status and insurance as predictors of use and a mount of use. The findings suggest that health status and financial re sources may Be more relevant areas for policy interventions than consi derations related to race and ethnicity.