Ethnic Leaders Find Hope in Health Care Plan

Without mincing words, President Obama on Wednesday night told a joint session of Congress that he wanted every American to have health insurance of one kind or another, and that he was looking for a bipartisan compromise to achieve that. He told detractors to stop using “scare tactics” and thereby lose yet another chance of succeeding in a much needed overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

Under his plan, Americans could choose to have private insurance coverage or a government insurance plan. And he was willing to consider alternatives to the “public option,” a provision that has created controversy. Obama’s plan would prevent insurers from being able to drop sick people or deny them coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The president’s primetime speech drew mixed reviews from minority community leaders, the medical community, academics and representatives of non-profit health care groups. Overall, he scored well with most of them.

David Villarejo, the former executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies and a staunch advocate of immigrant rights, said that even though he believed that Obama’s health care plan was “morally wrong” for denying subsidized health care to undocumented immigrants, he still approved of the plan.

“That’s a reasonable compromise, given the country’s economic situation and the very conservative views of so many Americans,” Villarejo said. “I don’t think we are going to get everything. Obama needs to find 60 votes in the Senate.”

Villarejo said he believes that was why Obama put off the issue of immigration reform and focused his energies on overhauling health care.

David E. Hayes-Bautista, professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said that before any health care policy is drawn up, Congress should first clear the incorrect “syllogism” – two premises and a conclusion – around Latinos.

The two false premises are that all Latinos are immigrants and all immigrants are undocumented. That leads people to wrongly conclude that all Latinos are undocumented, he said.

“As soon as people mention health policy and Latinos, the very first response is the word, ‘undocumented,’” Bautista said, noting that if that misconception is not cleared up, “we’re going to have a very biased conversation on Latino participation.

“And just as the death panel thing almost derailed everything, the all-Latinos-are-undocumented image needs to be exposed,” said Bautista.

President Obama estimated the plan to cost $900 billion over 10 years and said it would include a provision that would allow the government to impose more spending cuts if the savings he predicts don’t materialize.

There are currently 46.3 million uninsured people in the United States, 18.5 percent of them in California alone.

Dr. Sandra Hernandez, president of The San Francisco Foundation and an assistant clinical professor at University of California San Francisco, pointed out that Obama’s “comment that this reform legislation can’t add to the deficit has a lot of implications for Latinos in terms of prevention and changing behavior, eating healthy foods and not smoking, as a way to bring costs down.”

This means “that we have to do reform in a way that keeps us healthy and well and uses all the prevention we can,” she said.

Hernandez went on to say that Obama’s comment about the discussion of a public plan and “whether you die on that sword or not, is a means to an end and we should look at examples of where affordability is possible in the public or private and nonprofit sectors because there are good examples across the country. And it’s an area where the divide could come together.”