Immigration status is a health policy challenge | Health Insurance ...

The Obama administration?s drive to cut down on America?s uninsured is about to get multilingual. Come 2014, when core provisions of the Affordable Care Act kick in, millions of legal immigrants will have new options for gaining health coverage. And like U.S. citizens, most will be subject to the individual mandate, under which they will be required to get coverage to avoid a penalty.

The national health law explicitly excludes illegal immigrants ? a politically explosive topic ? and bans them from the new state insurance exchanges, even if they use their own money. They will make up a big chunk of the remaining uninsured population. But advocates say states have good reasons to reach out and get uninsured legal residents covered ? especially as the federal government picks up most of the tab.

?States with high immigrant populations are definitely looking forward to seeing how the Affordable Care Act is going to be able to provide the state more options for those immigrants,? said Sonal Ambegaokar, a health policy attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. According to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, non citizens ? legal and illegal ? are three times as likely as native-born citizens to be uninsured.

In 2014 ? assuming the health law survives the Supreme Court and hasn?t been undone by a new administration ? legal immigrants will be able to shop for health coverage through the new state insurance exchanges. They can get the same income-linked subsidies as citizens.

Legal immigrants? five-year federal waiting period for Medicaid, approved in 1996, won?t change. But for legal immigrants who have been here five years, Medicaid may be more accessible because it?s being expanded and the eligibility rules are being broadened. Traditionally, the states and Washington have split the costs of covering this low-income population, but Washington will pay more for the newly eligible.

States have the option of waiving the five-year rule for legal immigrants, but they must use their own funds, and only about 15 have done so, according to Kaiser. More have lifted the rules for children and pregnant women in the Children?s Health Insurance Program, Kaiser found.

Health policy experts say states have reasons to encourage legal immigrants to enroll in their exchanges. Most eligible immigrants are relatively young and healthy ? part of a population states want to have in an insurance pool to spread the risk and make the market work.

?The overall benefit of having the legal resident population in is it tends to be younger, and therefore, it can be healthier,? said Ruselle Robinson, a Boston-based health care attorney. ?That is the group that the individual mandate is trying to bring in.?

?It?s to a state?s advantage to really outreach and make sure all those immigrants who are eligible get enrolled,? agreed Ambegaokar.

One policy challenge has to do with ?mixed-status? families. Those are families in which the children are legal, but one or both parents are not. About 6 million kids were in such families in 2010, the Urban Institute estimated. According to Kaiser report, those children are ?are at increased risk of being uninsured.? The reason, Ambegaokar said, is many families with mixed status are hesitant to access the health care system, and others aren?t clear that some of their relatives may be eligible for coverage.

Even if states have energetic outreach efforts and boost enrollment among legal immigrants, they will face the daunting problem of care for undocumented immigrants ? about 10 million in 2010, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Payments to hospitals that treat disproportionate numbers of poor and uninsured patients will be cut under the health law because there will be fewer without coverage. But hospitals must provide emergency care to everyone. Any solutions will unfold in the charged environment that immigration policy engenders.

Even health care for legal residents can create political storms. Massachusetts state lawmakers tussled with Gov. Deval Patrick in 2009 when they attempted to strip subsidized health insurance from tens of thousands of lawful immigrants to help balance the budget. At Patrick?s insistence, those immigrants were instead placed in a program with reduced benefits. This year, the Massachusetts high court ruled the less-generous program is discriminatory and ordered state officials to return the immigrants to the state?s insurance exchange.

*Modified from a Politico.com article

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