The High Price
of No Health Insurance
By Viji Sundram
From just the smell
of their breath or the look on their faces, Karl
Smith could tell which of his students at Dejean
Middle School in West Contra Costa County were doing
poorly in school.
“There were a number of students I’d
have in a week who were visibly not well, and you
just can’t learn if you’re sick,”
said Smith, who recently quit his job at the Richmond
school where he had taught English as a second language
to immigrant children for almost 10 years. He said
some of his students had teeth so rotten it interfered
with their ability to form English words properly.
Nationwide studies show that 45 million people in
the United States have no health insurance. In California,
about 6.6 million are uninsured. On Monday, California
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled his much-anticipated
health care plan. It’s expected that the $2
billion in tax money that now goes to hospitals
will shift to buy insurance for some of the State’s
neediest.
The governor might have borrowed provisions from
health care plans enacted by Vermont and Massachusetts
last year that promised expanded health care coverage
to their residents, or he might have drawn upon
some of the provisions of the AllKids plan Illinois
finalized, that would provide health care for all
children in the state.
Whatever plan he chooses, the uninsured in the immigrant
community will be watching closely, especially Latinos
for whom the problem is more common. In California,
nearly 32 percent of Latinos are uninsured. And
almost 20 percent of the state’s uninsured
are children, the majority of them of Hispanic descent.
Among the undocumented, not having insurance is
more complicated than simply a matter of money.
Many simply don’t seek treatment because they
fear they could be deported if their illegal status
becomes known.
Many of Smith’s students were children of
undocumented Latinos, so public health care programs
such as Medi-Cal and Healthy Kids were unavailable
to them. And because private health insurance is
too pricey, often the only health care facilities
they could go to are community clinics. But these
clinics never ask clients about their legal status,
not every immigrant knows this and they would understandably
be scared to ask.
Often, fear of being reported “keeps them
from going to community clinics,” said Fremont
resident Agha Saeed, national chairman of the American
Muslim Alliance. “For minor illnesses, they
self-medicate. Some (undocumented Muslims) seek
free advice from doctors while attending prayer
services in mosques.
“But I know people with high blood-pressure
or poor vision who are too scared to seek treatment
because they do not want to call attention upon
themselves,” Saeed said.
Study after study has shown that the longer the
less educated and less affluent immigrant stayed
in the US, the more likely he or she was to report
declining health.
“Many folks won’t show up at our clinics
until they are in dire straits,” observed
Jane Garcia, chief executive officer at the Clinica
de la Raza Health Project in Oakland. La Raza offers
multi-service, low-cost health care to anyone who
needs it.
Racial and ethnic minorities tend not to practice
preventative health care says Andres Tapia, chief
diversity officer at Hewitt Associates, a global,
multi-services human resources firm, which works
with health management. As a result, third and fourth
generation Asians and Latino immigrants, more often
than whites, wait until they are in a health crisis
before they visit emergency rooms.
Disputing the myth that newer, undocumented immigrants
are clogging up emergency rooms, a new study suggests
that undocumented people use them far less than
legal immigrants and Americans. According to researchers
at Mexico’s National Population Council and
the University of California, only 9.8 percent of
Mexican adult migrants living in the US 10 years
or less visited an emergency room in the past year.
That’s less than half the rate among people
born in the US.
“Communities with the lowest [emergency department]
use tended to have a higher percentage of Hispanics
and non-citizens than communities with high ED use,”
said the study’s author, Peter Cunningham,
a senior fellow at the Center for Studying Health
System Change in Washington, DC.
By moving the burden on to individuals for their
own health care, the governor is recognizing preventative
care as the most important aspect of staying healthy.
“Preventative health care requires the belief
that what I do today can prevent a health problem
tomorrow,” Tapia said. “But unfortunately,
with many Latinos and Asians, there’s a strong
sense of external control, a sense of que sera,
sera.”
Wade Rose, vice president of External and Government
Relations at Catholic Health Service West, believes
that “the American psyche defining health
care as an individual’s responsibility”
is wrong. Health care is “a societal problem”
he says, and Americans “should come together
as a society and come to a [collective] decision
to take care of members of our society.”
As he puts it, “Are we our brother’s
keeper? The answer is yes.”
– New America Media
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