Why Latinos Really Need Health Care Reform

Latinos are a population that can really, really benefit from health care reform because, as a group, they have among lowest rates of health insurance coverage of any ethnic group. Not only do they face low insurance rates, but high rates of heart disease and diabetes, which could legitimately be called “debilitating” — especially without proper medical care. That, of course, means they’d be huge beneficiaries of the health care reform the Republicans are currently trying to do undo.

In an excellent column, John Gonzales and Yurina Rico with the CHCF Center for Health Reporting and La Opinión point out the specific “whys” of this fact:

If (health care reform) withstands court challenges and political opposition to reach the full implementation planned for 2014, it would provide medical coverage to more than 2.1 million Latinos statewide…

Nationally, reform could place 9 million Latinos in the federally funded health care system by 2014, according to White House estimates…

Approximately 15.8 million Latinos are currently uninsured in the United States, according to the Census…

Nearly one in three Latinos nationwide live without medical coverage. That is the highest national rate for any ethnic or racial group, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But even once health care reform is enacted, there are other changes that need to happen for Latinos. For one, Latinos have higher rates of some illnesses than any other groups, for another, the number of Spanish speaking medical professionals is in short supply. To take it to the real world for “Latinos,” as a Latina who speaks English and Spanish, this doesn’t affect me directly, but it certainly would affect my abuelitos, which is a pretty big deal to me.