44% in area without health insurance

Jake Rollow
El Paso Times
Sunday, January 22, 2006

El Paso health experts said local Hispanics and low- income earners suffer drastic shortages in health coverage and access to medical care, echoing a recent national study.

Hispanics had worse access to health services 88 percent of the time compared with non-Hispanic whites, according to the National Healthcare Disparities Report released this month. People earning low incomes faced worse access in 100 percent of the time when compared with wealthier U.S. residents.

And in El Paso, the access gap may be even wider because of the region's uninsured and undocumented populations, said Robert Anders, co-director of the Hispanic Health Disparities Research Center at UTEP.

Data collected by the Center for Border Health Research back Anders' claim. The center found that 44 percent of El Paso Hispanics lack insurance, as do about 50 percent of those with less than $25,000 annual household income.

Anders called for policies "to encourage employers to provide health insurance." He also said the majority of the uninsured in El Paso are women and children, in part because some employers that do provide insurance don't cover employees' families.

The national study also found that 53 percent of Hispanics and 85 percent of the poor received diminished quality of care when compared with non-Hispanic whites.

Experts said the trend exists in El Paso as well.

"There is no doubt," said Paso del Norte Health Foundation President Ann Pauli. It's partly because El Paso's ratio of doctors to patients is lower than the ratio in the rest of Texas, she said. "This is one of the reasons it will be so important to get that medical school here."

However, disparities in quality of care should not be blamed on the area's medical providers, said Enrique Mata, the foundation's senior program officer. "They are overwhelmed," he said.

At La Clinica Guadalupana, just three clinicians have 9,000 patient visits annually. Situated in the Agua Dulce colonia, southeast of Horizon City, the clinic provides basic family care to more than 3,000 people, most of whom are Hispanic and cannot afford insurance. Fees are determined on a sliding scale.

Medical Director Janet Gildae readily acknowledged that the clinic provides only the limited care it can afford. "But at least we're here," she said. Gildae said she founded Guadalupana 11 years ago because she saw that the area was in dire need of a health services. She thought other medical providers would follow, but that has not been the case.

Arcelia Rodriguez was among the people in the clinic's waiting room Friday afternoon who commended Guadalupana. She was there with her 6-year-old son, Pedro, who'd been unable to sleep the night before because of an earache.

Rodriguez said she considered taking Pedro to an emergency room until Guadalupana agreed to see him on short notice. Her family uses the clinic regularly because it's close and affordable and the doctors are good, she said.

Gildae said the survey's findings are not surprising but are appalling.

She and other health experts named a variety of actions that could help overcome disparities. Among those suggested were a national health care plan, more money for programs that seek to break the cycle of poverty or train medical professionals, and making "equitable" provider reimbursement rates for Medicaid -- rates that are lower in El Paso than other parts of Texas.

Efforts also need to be made to increase health literacy among Hispanics, to provide bilingual services and materials and to educate providers on Hispanic cultural norms, they said.

Salvador Balcorta, CEO of El Paso's Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe, was an appointee to the Minority Health Advisory Committee in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the body that produced the disparities report.

What's sad about the disparities study, he said, is that each year "it's almost the same."