Obamacare: Asian-Americans sign up in droves; Latinos disproportionately stay away
You've heard about the achievement gap, the wide disparity in educational performance between disadvantaged minorities and the rest of the student population.
Now comes the insurance gap, and in California it's playing out most notably in the number of Latinos and Asian-Americans signing up for private health plans under the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare.
Of the nearly 700,000 people who enrolled in a health plan as of Feb. 28 through the Covered California health insurance exchange and identified their ethnicity, 23.1 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander. Twenty-two percent were Latino.
But the statistics are startling when you consider that Latinos make up 38.2 percent of California's population and Asians just 13.7 percent.
"It's the only thing that has been surprising to us so far -- the higher Asian-American enrollment," said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, which worked with health policy experts at UCLA to make projections about the Obamacare rollout in California.
Experts attribute the disparity to several factors: Asians are more comfortable and more familiar with using government services, and the level of outreach by ethnic community groups on Obamacare has been much more strategic in Asian communities than in the Latino community. Also, fears about interacting with the government in Latino households with mixed immigration statuses have held down the number of Latinos signing up for health plans.
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In a 1993 groundbreaking study, Matloff showed that despite their "model minority" image and political conservatism, 55 percent of elderly Chinese were on welfare, mostly Supplemental Security Income. Among elderly Vietnamese immigrants, the figure was 74 percent, compared to 21 percent of Mexican immigrants and 9 percent of native-born elderly.
full: http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_25404950/obamacare-asian-americans-sign-up-droves-latinos-disproportionately
show the bolded part to your right wing friends who say "ILLEGAL ALIENS LEECHING OFF WELFARE AND OBAMACARE" and "IMMIGRATION REFORM = DEMOCRATS BUYING LATINO VOTE"...not to mention this myth about Asian-Americans being the "model minority" and Latinos and blacks the biggest consumers of welfare.
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