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The impact of ethnicity on attitudes toward health care reform in New Mexico

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.soscij.2009.11.006

1873-5355

Gabriel R. Sánchez, Amy Sue Goodin, Amelia A. Rouse, Richard Santos,

Global Health Workforce Issues

AbstractLatinos tend to have significantly lower levels of access to general and top quality medical care than do non-Latino whites, and although disparities in access to health care have diminished for all other minority groups over time, they have widened for Latinos. Given these trends, current attempts to provide universal health care at both the national and state levels across the United States have large implications for the health status of Latinos. The objective of this analysis is to determine whether Latinos have different attitudes regarding health reform than non-Latino whites. Our data are from a statewide random digit dialing telephone survey of New Mexico residents, age 18 and older, conducted in the Fall of 2007. With a Latino population of 44% and ongoing health care reform efforts by the state legislature, New Mexico is an ideal location for this analysis. After controlling for a host of individual level factors, our findings suggest that while Latinos are less likely to identify health care as a salient state issue relative to the economy and crime, they are more likely than non-Latino whites to believe affordable health care programs are important. Finally, Latinos view employers, more than government or individuals, to be responsible for expanding health care coverage. AcknowledgmentWe thank the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico for supporting this research.Notes1 We use Latino and Hispanic interchangeably throughout the analysis.2 Two of the most traditional explanations of health care disparities in the United States are lack of health insurance and low socioeconomic status—both critical for Latinos. For example, researchers find that insurance coverage is the key to understanding access to the use of primary care (Waidman & Rajan, 2000; Weinack, Zuvekas, & Cohen, 2000). Others find that lower levels of education and occupational status are associated with having less access to health care (Zuvekas & Taliaferro, 2003). Finally, studies have also demonstrated a significant causal association between language and disparities in health care access (Derose & Baker, 2000; Fiscell et al., 2002; Scheffler & Miller, 1989; Wienack & Kraus, 2000).3 The typical commercial standard is three call attempts.4 Hispanics comprise 44% of the New Mexico population, and more importantly for our purposes here, approximately 38% of the adult population in the state. Although we chose to utilize weighted data in the analysis that makes Hispanics equal to their ratio of the greater than aged 18 New Mexico population, the findings presented here are not distinct from findings generated with unweighted data in any significant ways.5 See Appendix A for a discussion of the measurement strategy for each explanatory variable.6 Marginal effects depict the impact of each independent variable on the high value of each dependent variable when all other factors are held to their means or modes. These values were generated using Stata's mfx and predict commands.7 Although page limitations motivated a decision to exclude the multivariate results regarding perceptions of who is responsible for paying for expansion of coverage, our analysis utilizing that dependent variable provided trends similar to those for the more general assessment of responsibility depicted in Table 6. Most relevant to this study, and consistent with Table 3, Latinos are more likely to view employers as the entity responsible for paying for extension of coverage relative to individuals.