Health insurance gap remains large in Texas Hispanic population

insurance gap uninsured

A new study has shown that this ethnic community still finds costs to be prohibitively high.

According to the outcome of the research conducted by a team at the Baker Institute from Rice University, the health insurance gap among the middle aged, lower income, and Hispanic populations.

Affordability was cited among the top reasons that many people in those communities remained uninsured.

The research team from the Baker Institute worked along with the Episcopal Health Foundation in order to prepare a number of briefs that would provide a better understanding of the insurance gap in the Texas population in terms of health plan coverage. Previously a report that stemmed from a joint effort between them had determined that the Affordable Care Act’s health care reforms had considerably reduced the uninsured rate in Texas, from having been 24.6 percent, down to 16.9 percent.

That said, the most recent study has shown that the insurance gap remains for certain groups of people.

insurance gap uninsuredThe research indicated that ethnicity, age, and family income are among the main factors that have caused an insurance gap to remain among some Texans. The Hispanic population is still greatly uninsured. In fact, people from that community make up 57.1 percent of the entire uninsured population of the state. Another 26 percent of the people without health plans are white, while black or non-Hispanic people make up the remaining 17 percent.

In terms of income, 66.9 percent of the people without health insurance in Texas were beneath the 138 percent of the federal poverty line. It was pointed out that if a Medicaid expansion or some similar alternative was developed by the state, those people would be in the group that would obtain coverage.

According to the Episcopal Health Foundation president and CEO, Elena Marks, who is also a Baker Institute nonresident health policy fellow, “Not surprisingly, the lowest-income adults comprise an increasingly large percentage of the uninsured, because most of them were ineligible for coverage opportunities in the Marketplace.” She went on to discuss the insurance gap by saying that “The ACA offered coverage to this group through optional Medicaid expansion, but Texas has not expanded Medicaid.”

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