We have made great strides in reducing the uninsured rate in Texas thanks to the Affordable Care Act, but there’s still a lot of work to do.
It’s constitutional – deal with it
The percentage of Hispanics in Texas without health insurance has dropped by 30 percent since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect, but almost one-third of Hispanic Texans ages 18 to 64 remain uninsured.
That’s one of the conclusions of a new report released today by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Episcopal Health Foundation.
The report found the uninsured rate among Hispanics ages 18 to 64 in Texas dropped from 46 percent in September 2013 to 32 percent in March 2016. But even with those gains, researchers estimate approximately 2 million Hispanics remain uninsured across the state. However, nearly half of uninsured Texas Hispanics are currently eligible to get health insurance through ACA plans or other private health insurance, the report said.
“We estimate 920,000 Hispanics are eligible for coverage now, even without Medicaid expansion or any other widespread change in coverage,” said Elena Marks, EHF’s president and CEO and a nonresident health policy fellow at the Baker Institute. “This report clearly shows the need for outreach and enrollment efforts to continue to focus on Hispanic Texans who are uninsured but eligible for coverage.”
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“After three open-enrollment periods of the ACA marketplace, the uninsured rate among Hispanics is still three times that of whites,” said Vivian Ho, the chair in health economics at Rice’s Baker Institute and director of the institute’s Center for Health and Biosciences, a professor of economics at Rice and a professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “The disparity between the two groups remains striking. The Hispanic population is growing at a faster rate than the state average, which makes it increasingly important to the entire state that Hispanics gain affordable health insurance coverage.”
The report shows that although more Hispanic Texans remain uninsured, they enrolled in ACA health insurance plans at twice the rate of whites. Researchers found 21 percent of all insured Hispanics in Texas are covered by ACA plans, compared with only 11 percent of whites across the state.
“This shows that the ACA marketplace is an important source of affordable health insurance for Hispanics,” Ho said.
The report is only nine pages, so go take a look at it. I can tell you that the main reasons for the gap are the failure to expand Medicaid, and a still-significant number of people who have not yet enrolled in any plan. The authors recommend more outreach to the latter subgroup, but that’s easier – and a lot cheaper – said than done. There are numerous community and national organizations that have done a ton of hard work informing people about their health insurance and subsidy options, but they do so in an environment where the state government is actively hostile to them. There’s a reason why some states have lowered their uninsured rates a lot more than some others.