August 18, 2015
By Anna Challet
A study has found that hundreds of thousands of children who are eligible for health care are not currently enrolled. Some of these children are kids who have undocumented parents, but who are themselves citizens or lawfully residing in the United States. Some of them are eligible for the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program but haven’t applied. In California, if you qualify for DACA, you qualify for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.
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“As we wait for immigration reform to take effect, there’s still a number of kids in immigrant families in California that are eligible for coverage now,” says Sonya Schwartz, a research fellow at Georgetown and one of the authors of the study. “There’s up to about 400,000 kids who are eligible right now who we could be enrolling in programs.” …
There are a variety of reasons why kids in the latter group might not be signed up already, says Schwartz.
“Immigrant families have additional barriers to getting into programs that others don’t necessarily face,” she says. “There can be fears about immigration status and information you have to share about yourself, even though there are protections for parents who don’t want to share personal information.”
“There are so many citizen kids and lawfully residing kids who are living with immigrant parents, and they’re just hard to reach because parents are busy working two jobs, they’re not necessarily native English speakers, they might not know what’s available,” she adds. “Or you might have a family where there’s an older child who is undocumented who was born abroad, and then kids born here after that who are eligible for coverage, and parents may not want to just enroll one.” …
“Four hundred thousand kids in California could be eligible now for coverage, and then another 170,000 more kids in May, and then hundreds of thousands of parents and older kids when immigration reforms make their way through the courts,” says Schwartz. “It’s huge.”
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