Facts About Immigration and Health Care Reform

July 23, 2009

Bill Hing blogged yesterday about the coverage of undocumented immigrants in health care reform, which the President discussed generally last night. I wanted to provide a little bit of factual material on immigrant health care usage.

In a 2007 study published by the Archives of Internal Medicine, undocumented Mexicans and other undocumented Latinos reported less use of health care services and poorer experiences with care compared with their US-born counterparts.

A May 2009 report Heading South: Why Mexican Immigrants in California Seek Health Services in Mexico (Medical Care) found that, driven by rising healthcare costs at home, nearly one million Californians cross the border each year to seek medical care in Mexicoe. An estimated 952,000 California adults sought medical, dental or prescription services in Mexico annually. Of these, 488,000 were Mexican immigrants. The article is the first large-scale population-based research ever published on U.S. residents who travel to Mexico for health services. It is based upon an analysis of data from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), the nation’s largest state health survey.

Thanks to my colleague Lisa Ikemoto for informing me about these two research reports.

The Immigration Policy Center (July 22, 2009) has released a fact sheet on immigrants and health care reform. As Congress debates health care, and decides who to include in their sweeping reform package, it is important to review the basic facts about immigrant participation in health care.

Highlights of the current data show:

• U.S. citizens make up the majority of the uninsured, at 78%, while legal and unauthorized immigrants make up 22% of the nonelderly uninsured.

• Immigrants incur fewer health care costs than the rest of the population because they are generally younger and healthier than the overall aging U.S. population.

• Immigrants’ per-person medical expenditures were one-half to two-thirds less than U.S.-born citizens.

• Recent immigrants were responsible for 1.4% of the total public medical expenditures for adults in 2003, even though they constituted 5% of the total population.

• The cost of Medicaid and Medicare could be as much as $1.2 trillion per year by 2015. Having more healthy, working-age people paying into the system will lessen the burden on the current, smaller pool of taxpayers.

• Non-citizens are a vast, untapped network of new subscribers who can share the risks and the benefits of health care coverage.

Update: Two recent Health Reform Watch blog posts (here and here) on undocumented immigrants and healthcare by Kathleen M. Boozang (Seton Hall) are worth reading.