November 14, 2011: SHADAC’s Jessie Kemmick-Pintor and Lynn Blewett published an article in the October 2011 issue of Minnesota Physician as part of the journal’s special focus section on health reform. The article, "Immigrant access to health care," reviews the key provisions of national legislation pertaining to access to care for immigrants.
The authors use insurance coverage among immigrants as a means of addressing health care access issues, pointing out that across the U.S. and within Minnesota, non-citizens are four times more likely to be uninsured than their citizen counterparts (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).
Federal policies that have hindered coverage among the immigrant population include, among others, a 1996 law under which legal immigrants lost eligibility for all means-tested, federally funded programs—including Medicaid—for their first five years in the U.S. More recently, the Affordable Care Act specifically excludes many immigrants from coverage: Legal immigrants are in most cases still subject to the five-year ban, and undocumented immigrants remain ineligible for public coverage through Medicaid or CHIP regardless of their length of time in the U.S. Moreover, undocumented immigrants are specifically prohibited from purchasing coverage in federal and state insurance exchanges and are specifically exempt from the individual mandate.
The authors foresee an increasing reliance on formal and informal safety nets to provide care for uninsured immigrants under the restrictions of the Affordable Care Act. At the same time, less political will and lower state and federal tax revenue is likely to be directed to the safety net.