Health Care Reform, the Immigration Debate…and the Value of Sharing Maps

In response to the previous post, Uninsured in America – Certainly, there are many variables we could map to explore the issue of health care reform and access to insurance. Percents, levels, rates and different indicators – Each will tell a different aspect of the story and in whole, will provide a richer understanding of the issue. The list of related datasets in Geocommons that I am providing on my weekly Wednesday post is designed to allow anyone to go about this type exploration.

The idea to map percentages comes from an article I read last week that talks about a study that was just released by the Commonwealth Fund on health care in America (Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scoreboard on Health System Performance). They rank states based on 20 or so variables (one being percent uninsured). What caught my attention is that Texas ranks the highest in terms of percent uninsured. I was curious about this and what a more fine-grained geographical analysis would show and indeed the results of my mapping were consistent with the findings of the Commonwealth Fund study, at least in terms of the percent who are uninsured. The areas of the country where there are high percentages of individuals without health insurance are in the south and southwest.

When I initially created the map, it sparked another wave of curiosity. Are these immigrants who are the uninsured? What I found is that access to health care insurance is very much tied to immigration and the Hispanic population. Here are some of the statistics I found through the U.S. Census: 1. Immigrants (including naturalized citizens) comprise roughly 26% of the uninsured 2. Foreign borns are 2.5 more likely to not have insurance than native Americans 3. A little over 43% of non-citizens are without insurance and 4. Hispanics, the largest minority group in America, are 3 times more likely than non-Hispanic to have health insurance.

The map in the previous post, showing the numbers of uninsured by county sparked yet another wave of curiosity. I wondered if those counties that ranked high in terms of the numbers were also counties with high concentrations of immigrants and/or Hispanics. When I took a look at some numbers from the Census, I found that indeed, this is the case. A map of the number of uninsured immigrants by county would be an interesting next step in the exploration process!

And there’s the value of sharing analysis and maps online in a collaborative forum – I learned something. It looks like the debate on health care reform is very much tied to the debate on immigration.