Covid exposes inequity in health insurance
by Ted Hyngstrom
According to the CDC Covid has unequally impacted certain racial and ethic groups, putting them more at risk of getting sick and dying from Covid.
Today, most people in the United States have health insurance. Some 300 million people have the money and ability to pay for health insurance. This allows comfort when having to pay medical costs. However, roughly 30 million people cannot pay. This stems from several requirements to be able to have medical insurance, including the need to make your payments, have permanent residency, green card, or citizenship of the United States, and how hard it is to have health insurance if you are a person of color.
In the United States, there is currently no free healthcare meaning that to have health insurance, you must have enough money to pay for it. And even though efforts such as the ACA, or the Affordable Care Act, have brought down the cost of Health Insurance significantly, it is still true that many uninsured adults have found that they aren’t insured because of the high costs associated with insurance. This is definitively the biggest reason why people don’t have health insurance. Everyone wants it, but only those who can pay get it.
A second requirement for being able to pay for health insurance is that you must be a permanent resident of, have a green card in, or be a citizen of the United States. Not being in any of these classifications means a person is undocumented, and not allowed to purchase health insurance. It was estimated that 10.7 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States in 2018. These are several million people who then couldn’t afford health insurance.
A pattern discovered when looking at people who have health insurance is the color of their skin. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that “People of color makeup 43.1% of the nonelderly U.S. population, but account for over half of the total nonelderly uninsured population. Hispanic, Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiians, and Other Pacific Islander people all have significantly higher uninsured rates than White people.” This proves you have a much higher chance of being insured if you were white than if you were in any other race.
It was extremely obvious before and Covid has made it more apparent that there is an issue in how we get health insurance.
If the obstacles we’ve put in place with the ACA – the ability to legally live in a country, and the color of one’s skin – can stop them from getting the health insurance, then they need to be able to cover health associated costs. It is my opinion that we should move past payment-based health insurance, allow people not from this country to attain the health insurance they need, and stop the racism that runs rampant throughout the system. Not just for those 30 million, but for all people as well.
