Where Obamacare and immigration reform collide

the US Senate Majority, November 5, 2014 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The worst political news for President Obama, on top of the crushing mid-term elections defeat for his party, is that the centerpiece of his legacy may be in trouble in the most unexpected of places.
A year after open enrollment under the Affordable Care Act began, 1 in 4 Latinos in the United States still do not have health insurance, according to new Census Bureau data – and it may be an uphill struggle to reverse that.
That is significant to Obama’s legacy since it was widely assumed that Latinos would be the backdrop for the success of Obamacare, both because they are its biggest target ethnic group and were the celebrated core of his 2008 and 2012 success in several critical states.
But now comes this unexpected political collision: Obamacare is the president’s legacy issue and if it fails among Latinos – who are already suspicious of him because of broken promises on immigration reform – there may be little of lasting importance on which to hang his presidency.
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It may be both ironic and coincidental that Obamacare and the immigration reform have become almost inseparable in trying to connect Latinos to the Affordable Care Act.
In California alone, at least 600,000 Latinos — or almost twice those who have enrolled — are still balking at signing up for Obamacare, despite qualifying for subsidized coverage under the federal health law, out of fear it could lead to the deportation of undocumented relatives.
It is a fear heightened by the fact that the federal government has deported more than two million immigrants in the U.S. illegally since Obama took office in 2009.
“This is a very big deal in California,” says Catherine Teare of the California HealthCare Foundation. “It’s really hard for Covered California or anybody to make those concerns go away.”
It has become such an issue that the state’s exchange, Covered California, is tackling the immigration fears directly for the first time this fall in new TV ads targeting Hispanics for open enrollment which starts Nov. 15 and runs to Feb. 15.
But officials fear it will be a hard sell to many Latino families of mixed immigration status, even though last March Obama appeared on the Spanish-language TV network Univision attempting to assure Latinos that information they provide about extended family members in the country illegally would not be turned over to immigration officials.
At that time, as of April, when the first open enrollment in Obamacare ended, some 367,000 Latinos in California had signed up for insurance through the state’s health care enrollment exchange.
All in all, California has the highest percentage of uninsured Latinos in the country at nearly 60 percent,