While encouraging listeners to sign up for the Affordable Care Act on a spanish-speaking radio station Tuesday, President Obama assured them that enrollment would not result in the deportation of their undocumented relatives living here illegally.
“Well, the main thing for people to know is that any information you get, you know, asked with respect to buying insurance, does not have anything to do with … the rules governing immigration,” Obama said In an interview with Univision Deportes, according to The Hill. “And you know, you can qualify if you’re a legal resident, if you are … legally present in the United States.”
The glitch-ridden English-language version of HealthCare.gov, the Affordable Care Act’s website, pales in comparison to that of the Spanish-language version, helping to make for dismal sales to the Hispanic community. The president appeared on the popular Univision sports show to try to boost sales and quell the fears of its listeners.
“You know, if you have a family where some people are citizens or legally here, and others are not documented, the immigration people will never get that information.”
The Hispanic community remains a huge market for Obamacare. Townhall notes these statistics provided by the Department of Health and Human Services:
As many as i in 4 uninsured individuals who are eligible for coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplace nationwide are Latino. Through the Marketplace, 10.2 million uninsured Latinos have new opportunities for affordable health insurance coverage. The majority (62 percent) of uninsured Latinos live in California, Texas, and Florida; about half (4.6 million) are between the ages of 18 and 35.
However, fear of deportation remains a deterrent for Hispanics, according to Adolf Falcon, the senior vice president of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health
“It is a big concern of mixed status families — they hear [the president’s] assurance, but because of the level of deportations that have happened, there’s a lot of families that don’t know whether they can trust that assurance,” he told The Hill. “It creates an atmosphere of concern.”
The Hill reported:
Falcon said his group fields about 4,000 calls a week from potential Hispanic consumers seeking information about the exchanges. He said that a good deal of the callers are asking about mixed-status families, seeking to make sure their applications can’t be used against family members.
For example, a family with a parent who is in the country illegally, and thus not eligible for ObamaCare, will still have to enroll his or her child who is eligible. This provokes fears in the parent that they are leaving themselves exposed.
Obama continued to try to squelch those fears Tuesday.
“You know, you will qualify, you know, regardless of what your family’s status is,” he said. “So, you know, people should not hold back just because they’re in a mixed-family status.”
