Healthcare availability for undocumented immigrants in the United States

In the United States, illegal immigrants have lower rates of health insurance coverage and medical service usage than their U.S.-born counterparts and immigrant groups with legal status residing in the United States. Having medical insurance coverage—whether private or through Medicaid—significantly influences the actual utilization of healthcare services by illegal immigrants.

Several municipalities in the United States offer health care coverage for illegal immigrants, including Los Angeles County's My Health LA program, and San Francisco's Healthy San Francisco.

Overview

Main article: Immigrant health care in the United States

Estimates suggest as of 2010 there are approximately 11.2 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, along with an additional 4.5 million US-born legal residents who are the children of illegal immigrants. This has resulted in a number of “mixed status” families concentrated in states such as California, Florida, New York and Texas, as well as newer immigrant destination states such as Illinois and Georgia. Moreover, within these mixed-status families there are often inequalities in access to a variety of resources, including healthcare.

Undocumented Immigrant Entrees in U.S. between 1980-2009

Health care usage

Despite popular belief, a number of studies have found that undocumented immigrants in the United States have lower rates of health insurance coverage and usage of healthcare services in general. According to study conducted using data from the 2003 California Health Interview Survey, of the Mexicans and other Latinos surveyed, illegal immigrants had the lowest rates of health insurance and healthcare usage and were the youngest in age overall. In fact, the study found that overall illegal Mexicans had 1.6 fewer physician visits and illegal Latinos had 2.1 fewer physician visits compared to their U.S.-born counterparts. Some scholars have attributed this lower usage of healthcare services to the “Hispanic Epidemiological Paradox” where the health outcomes of Hispanic and Latino Americans have been found to be comparable or better than white Americans, paradoxical to their lower socioeconomic status. However, others point to the negative experiences of illegal groups when seeking medical treatment or other forms of healthcare service. For example, this same study from the 2003 California Health Interview Survey found that both illegal groups—Mexican and Other Latino—were more likely to report negative experiences with healthcare providers and less likely to have a regular source of care because of such experiences. Meanwhile, US-born Latinos with U.S. citizenship were more likely to self-report their health as good or excellent and more likely to have visited a physician in the last year.

Findings on the use of specific healthcare services by illegal immigrants have been more varied. For example, this same California 2004 study found that illegal immigrants are significantly less likely than naturalized citizens and U.S.-born-citizens to visit the emergency department. These findings are supported by a study conducted in 2000 using data from a 1996 survey of undocumented Latino immigrants in four U.S. cities: Houston and El Paso, Texas and Fresno and Los Angeles, California. This study found that illegal immigrants obtain fewer ambulatory physician visits than other Latinos or the rest of the U.S. population collectively. Additionally, for those illegal immigrants who did regularly visit a physician, their rates at three or four visits per year were still lower than those of Latinos at six visits per year. In regards to Medicaid, this study found that “With approximately 2 million undocumented immigrants in California, even 10 to 15 percent of them on Medicaid would represent only 4% of total Medicaid eligible statewide.” On the other hand, findings from the 2009 California Health Interview Survey indicate that no significant differences have been found in the diagnoses of undocumented immigrants for diabetes, heart disease, or high blood pressure compared to documented immigrants, naturalized citizens or U.S.-born citizens.

Expenditures

While there is less information available on illegal immigrants, research shows that immigrants have substantially lower overall healthcare expenditures than U.S.-born persons. In 1998, the per capita total health care expenditure amount spent on immigrants was 55% lower than that spent on their U.S.-born counterparts and 74% lower for their children. Moreover, immigrant healthcare expenditure totaled $39.5 billion that year constituting only 7.9% of the U.S. total. These lower expenditures have raised a number of questions about the accessibility of health care services and insurance to both documented and undocumented immigrants.

Barriers to access

Illegal immigrants face a number of economic, social and political barriers in accessing healthcare services.

Employment factors

From an economic standpoint, illegal immigrants in the United States are often employed in jobs in either the secondary or informal sectors of the labor market. Subject to influences of the larger international economic system, firms in the secondary sector often offer undocumented immigrants a sense of ethnic solidarity and opportunities for upward economic mobility in exchange for few social benefits and lower pay. Similarly, undocumented immigrants employed in the informal sector after often provided scarce health benefits, if given medical insurance at all while simultaneously relying on temporary contract work or other self-employment or small-business employment opportunities. Given their wages, these limited employment options also limit the ability of undocumented immigrants to meet financial requirements for accessing private healthcare coverage. All of these factors combined result in the unlikelihood that undocumented immigrants will have government-funded health insurance, have private medical insurance, or be able to cover medical costs through their own financial resources. In fact, even for work-related injuries, it is often difficult for undocumented immigrants to receive or gain access to treatment.

Socioeconomic status

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services provided new federal guidelines to determine financial eligibility for social service benefits for those living below the poverty line. These guidelines, though slightly different are comparable to those in 2007 in regards to household income. While most Hispanics have some sort of employment, the largest group of Mexicans and Latinos living below the federal poverty level in 2007 was the illegals at 50 percent of their population, followed by green-card holders, naturalized citizens, and U.S.-born Mexicans. In comparison, in 2007 approximately five percent of U.S.-born whites were living at less than 100% of the federal poverty level. These patterns speak to the long-term influence of legal status on access to healthcare services.

Language barriers and ethnicity

Socially, illegal immigrants also confront language barriers daily and other cultural barriers in accessing healthcare. In the 2003 analysis from the California Health Interview Survey they found of all Mexican and Latino immigrants, illegal immigrants had the highest rates of noting difficulty understanding their physician during their last visit. During these visits these undocumented immigrants also felt they would receive better care were they of a different race or ethnicity.

Political debate

The use of public services by illegal immigrants, including healthcare has been tied into the larger national debate over immigration while simultaneously lying the intersection of two contentious debates involving health reform and immigration reform. Proponents of more restrictive service use policies have argued that lax immigration policies will encourage more illegal persons to relocate to the United States illegally. They also argue healthcare policies which make insurance, coverage, and treatment more accessible to all populations will encourage illegal immigrants to overuse services without contributing their fair share to the tax base, ultimately placing an unjust burden on the general public Meanwhile, both taxpayers and politicians point to state welfare and Medicaid programs as specific areas of concern when it comes to such healthcare use by illegal populations.

On the other hand, research has found that because immigrants come primarily to the U.S. in search of employment, excluding illegal immigrants from receiving government-funded healthcare services will not reduce the number of illegal or legal immigrants. In fact, those who support more inclusive healthcare policies argue such provisions would ultimately harm the well-being of U.S.-born children living in mixed status households, since these policies have made it more difficult for these children to receive care. In support of this position, the National Research Council also concluded immigrants collectively add as much as $10 billion to the national economy each year, paying on average $80,000 per capita more in taxes than they use in government services over their lifetimes, where these patterns of expenditures and usage also extend to illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, the ongoing debate and subsequent policy-decisions have important implications for the healthcare of illegal immigrants residing in the United States.

Policy context

President Obama signing the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

Federal legislation

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. The ACA contains language that explicitly excludes illegal immigrants from being able to purchase health insurance coverage. However, the ACA also provides additional funding for community health centers and clinics, which play an integral role in implementing provisions of the ACA and are heavily relied upon by illegal immigrants. The Gruber MicroSimulation Model estimates that the rise in uninsurance rates of undocumented immigrants will be negligible nationwide with higher coverage rates for the rest of the population under the ACA. At a state level though, the impacts of the ACA will vary depending on the percentage of uninsured illegal immigrants among their statewide population.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 redefined the social membership of immigrants by restricting their access to social services, representing a federal shift in immigration policy. PRWORA draws a distinction between benefits—most significantly Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Medicaid—accessible to citizens, but not to noncitizens, including lawfully present immigrants. Moreover, while illegal immigrants have never been eligible for these benefits, these laws result in even greater barriers to access in the form of higher financial burdens placed on states which want to offer substitute programs, and stricter federal enforcement and outlining of restrictions. For example, IIRIRA mandates a legally binding “affidavit of support” where state or local governments may sue the sponsors or petitioners of immigrants for the value of the public benefits or services acquired while ineligible. Such provisions also place greater strains on relatives in “mixed status” households who may wish to help illegal immigrant members of their family or extended family.

International perspective

Other foreign countries are also wrestling with questions related to the access of illegal immigrants to national healthcare services and insurance programs. In particular, physicians who are often the point of contact in providing care have become increasingly vocal in these discussions. In Europe, pediatricians have been advocating for the extension of the UN convention to immigrants, refugees, and “paperless” children. Similarly pediatricians in Sweden have openly gone against statewide policies excluding asylum-seeking children from gaining access to medical care and in fact worked to create an alternative state-funded health program for these children in particular.

See also

• My Health LA
• Healthy Way LA