Immigrant Health Care in The United States - Findings and Statistics

Findings and Statistics

Since the enactment of PRWORA in 1996, the gap in health coverage between immigrants and citizens has grown considerably. In addition to the context of welfare policy, however, immigrant access to health care is also governed by several other factors: socioeconomic background (e.g. educational attainment and occupation), language skills, immigration status, geographic location, and stigma. With two or more of these factors compounded together, health outcomes can vary substantially across individual families but regardless, they are considerably disadvantaged compared to U.S.-born citizens.

Immigrants, on average, use less than half the dollar amount of health care services that American-born citizens use, receiving about $1,797 per capita compared to their U.S.-born counterparts' $3,702. Moreover, low-income immigrants are over two times more likely to lack health insurance than low-income citizens. In general, they have less interaction with the health care system, though incidences in which they do tend more likely to be through emergency departments. Interestingly, collected data indicates lower levels of heart disease, arthritis, depression, hypertension, asthma, and cancer among immigrants than U.S.-born citizens. Speculation behind this phenomena looks towards the fact that the immigrant population is generally younger than the native-born population as a whole; others believe that these medical conditions simply have not yet been detected given the immigrants' lower rates of health coverage.

Overall, analyses indicate that after factors such as health status, income, and race/ethnicity are controlled for, citizenship status plays a significant role in determining one's medical care access. Noncitizen immigrants and their children are less likely to be insured, and the lack of insurance consequently reduces their ability to receive care. Naturalized citizens, on the other hand, generally receive the same level of health care access as U.S.-born citizens, implying that health care usage becomes more available with acculturation.