Spanish Speakers Have Difficulty Accessing Health Care in U.S.

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 17 (HealthDay News) -- Spanish-speaking Hispanics in the United States have difficulty accessing the health-care system, University of North Carolina researchers report.

"We found that the U.S. Spanish-speaking adult population represents a particularly vulnerable subset of U.S. Hispanics, with far worse access to the health-care system," said lead researcher C. Annette DuBard, from the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

One out of five U.S. residents speak a primary language other than English at home, and almost one in 10 report an ability to speak English less than "very well," according to U.S. Census figures from 2006.

Until recently, methods for monitoring the health status of the population and progress toward public health objectives have often been limited to the English-speaking population, DuBard noted. "Fully addressing health-care disparities will require a better understanding of contributing factors within the rich diversity of the U.S. population," she said.

The report was published in the Sept. 17 online edition of theAmerican Journal of Public Health.

For the study, DuBard and her colleague, Ziya Gizlice, from the university's Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, collected data on 45,076 Hispanic adults across the United States. This represents about 90 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population. The data came from the 2003 to 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

The researchers compared Spanish-speaking Hispanics with English-speaking Hispanics for 25 health indicators.

DuBard and Gizlice found that Spanish-speaking Hispanics had significantly lower rates of chronic disease, obesity and smoking. They engaged in less physical activity, and they lagged behind in the use of preventive health-care services.

In addition, more than half of Spanish-speaking adults lacked health insurance and a personal physician, and one out of four were unable to seek needed care in the past year because of cost, DuBard said. "Language-associated disparities in access to care are most pronounced in regions of the country experiencing rapid new growth of the Hispanic population," she added.

Priorities for addressing the health needs of the Spanish-speaking population include promotion of physical activity and healthy weight, and improved access to affordable, timely, language-appropriate care, DuBard said.

William Vega, a professor of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks that poverty, not language, is the real culprit in the lack of access to health care among Hispanic Americans.

"It is a bit unfortunate that the authors of this piece choose to create the impression that language was a causal factor in receiving less care or lower quality of care," Vega said. "Spanish language use is a proxy of low acculturation, lower income, and lower education in the Latino population, and studies have shown that this language differential does not persist across generations, that is, the children of immigrants quickly become English-language dominant in childhood even when Spanish is their first language," he said.