Hispanics are Obamacare’s potential target

The Obama administration took to the Spanish-language airwaves as part of their plan to get Latinos to apply for Obamacare. In appearances on TV channels Telemundo & Univision, Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius & Director of Public Health Mayra Alvarez was found to encourage viewers to enroll in the insurance marketplaces that states are starting up in October. They launched a new government web site in Spanish, cuidadodesalud.gov, which steers people to sign up.

President Barak Obama owes his re-election in part to Hispanics; as Kaiser Health News observes, they will also be critical to his legacy in terms of health care. Obamacare mandates that people who do not have insurance enroll in state-run market places, known as exchanges or pay a penalty. For health care plans offered through the market places to be reasonably priced, Obama administration needs young & healthy people to enroll as their premiums will help subsidize care for the vulnerable. Hispanics are potential target as the median age for a Hispanic in America is 27.6 years old with respect to 42.3 years old for whites. Hispanics account for 17% of the American population but make up a full third of the uninsured.

Critics of the law have cast it as a free offer for minorities. After the poll, Mitt Romney marked that he’d lost because Barak Obama gave freebie to some special interest groups including Hispanics. Referring to Obamacare, Mitt Romney told that for Hispanic voters, free healthcare plan was a big plus.

Romney was right that some very poor Hispanics will get free healthcare plan under Obamacare as the law expands Medicaid in some states. Yet it is possible that all kinds of U.S. citizens will actually get a gift, as it were, from Hispanics. If the U.S. administration’s PR campaign targeting them is successful & they enroll en masse, Hispanics could end up subsidizing healthcare for many other people.