Poll: Immigrants rank health care as No. 1 concern |
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Written by U.S. Insurance News
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Sunday, 03 August 2003 |
Poll: Immigrants rank health care as No. 1 concern
It may be the best kept secret in American law — a secret that is keeping millions of Californians from getting quality health care. A new multilingual poll of California immigrants commissioned by New California Media, a coalition of over 500 ethnic news organizations, found that a majority of all California immigrants are unaware they have a right to ask for an interpreter when seeking medical care. Yet that right has been the law ever since the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination on the basis of national origin.
SAN FRANCISCO — It may be the best kept secret in American law — a secret that is keeping millions of Californians from getting quality health care.
A new multilingual poll of California immigrants commissioned by New California Media, a coalition of over 500 ethnic news organizations, found that a majority of all California immigrants are unaware they have a right to ask for an interpreter when seeking medical care. Yet that right has been the law ever since the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination on the basis of national origin.
The poll, conducted by noted Spanish language pollster Sergio Bendixen, is the first ever to study the role of language barriers in health care as reported by immigrants. Some 1,200 Californians representing roughly seven of the nine million immigrants living in California were surveyed by telephone in 11 languages and dialects including Armenian, Cantonese, Cambodian, Mandarin, Hmong, Korean, Farsi, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese. The multilingual poll was funded by The California Endowment, a statewide health foundation.
"Medical care is rated as the most important issue by California immigrants — in contrast to the general population which ranks it well below education and unemployment,” Bendixen said. “And the poll found a direct correlation between a person's ability to speak English and the quality of health care he or she receives.
"Among Hispanics, the state's largest immigrant group, the language barriers are even higher than expected," said Bendixen, who has been conducting Spanish language polls for more than a decade. "Some 74 percent of Hispanic immigrants told us that they spoke English "not well or not at all."
According to the poll, half of Cambodians, Koreans, Chinese and Hmong also reported serious problems speaking English. However, the majority of immigrants have taken classes to improve their fluency in English: 84 percent of Iranians, 82 percent of Vietnamese and 80 percent of Cambodians.
"When you combine these language problems with lack of access to medical insurance, the groups facing the greatest problems accessing quality health care are Hispanics and Koreans," Bendixen said.
But the issue of language barriers impacts all groups, he said. Which is why at least one third of all immigrants interviewed rate the overall quality of health care they receive as poor or very poor — again, significantly lower than the general public ratings reported by a Gallup poll last year.
Not surprisingly, the NCM poll found that the vast majority of California immigrants rely on foreign language media as their primary source for information about health care.
"The poll is a wakeup call for NCM," said Sandy Close, executive director. "It tells us not only that health care is the major source of anxiety — more than earning a living or getting their kids in school — for our audiences. It underscores ethnic media's responsibility in alleviating that anxiety."
The first step towards that end is a two-year NCM social marketing campaign also funded by the California Endowment that aims to increase immigrants' awareness of their rights to language services in health care settings. Close is confident that ethnic media's coverage of the issue — together with advertisements running during the next three months — will drive awareness up among all groups.
"We hope that this campaign will help to increase the use of medical interpreters by physicians, hospitals and other health providers,” said Ignatius Bau, program officer at The Endowment. “Greater use of medical interpreters will result in improve communications between doctors and patients, and result in the higher quality of medical care. As ethnic media promote greater awareness, and more Californians begin demanding language services, health care providers and the state will expand the very scanty infrastructure that now exists." |
