The State - News from Aug. 3, 1989

In a survey of 652 low-income families in north Orange County published in the American Journal of Medicine, UC Irvine researchers found that 28% of the adults and 18% of the children had no physician, clinic or hospital that was their regular source of medical care. Principal investigator F. Allen Hubbell also reported that more than half the adults and children in the study had not seen a dentist in the last year, and 5% of the children were never immunized against polio, diphtheria, whooping cough or tetanus. Hubbell and three co-authors also found that low-income people without health insurance have an especially hard time securing care. Hubbell, an internist, said that one of the more significant and “disturbing findings . . . is the fact that these types of problems could occur in one of the more affluent areas of the country. I hate to think what may be going on in areas that aren’t affluent.”