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As many as 220,000 immigrant children in California will not be eligible for health insurance coverage under federal health care reform, according to a policy brief released Thursday by the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Health Policy Research.
Beginning in 2014, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as PPACA, or “puh-pack-uh”) will expand Medicaid coverage and provide insurance subsidies to the nation’s growing uninsured population. But the expanded coverage will not apply to undocumented immigrants or to legal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for fewer than five years, an exemption that affects many of California's 10 million immigrants.
“It’s not so much that we think the A.C.A. [Affordable Care Act] is a bad law,” said Shana Alex Lavarreda, one of the brief’s co-authors and the director of Health Insurance Studies. “It’s just that we think there are holes in it and kids are falling in these holes. It’s not 100 percent.”
Of the expected 220,000 uninsured immigrant children, an estimated 150,000 would qualify for Medi-Cal in 2014, if not for the reform's immigration status exemptions.
Another 30,000 of the 220,000 do not qualify for Medi-Cal, but would be eligible for other health insurance subsidies. However their immigrantion status would prevent them from receiving any such help.
The remaining 40,000 are eligible for coverage, but their families may not know that children who are citizens can obtain health insurance regardless of the parents’ immigration status.
State budget cuts to Medi-Cal and Healthy Families will deliver a double blow to the uninsured.
The lack of coverage for immigrant children will shift an even greater burden to California’s community health centers, which in 2007 provided the usual source of care for almost half of the state’s uninsured kids.
In the long run, says Lavarreda, a large uninsured population strains California's entire health care system.
“People who are uninsured don't get the care that they need,” Lavarreda said. “They put off care for longer. Then when they get health care it's much more expensive, so you get health care costs in terms of money, but also in terms of human suffering."
Data for the policy brief came from the 2007 California Health Interview Survey, which is funded by the California Endowment, a private health foundation that also supports The Bay Citizen’s environmental health coverage.
© The Bay Citizen, 2012
