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

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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.

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"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.

Spanish language dominance is a transitional status routinely found in immigrant groups, especially recent arrivals, and not a permanent impediment that is passed forward to new generations, Vega said. "Regrettably, a disproportionate percentage of Latino immigrant families are also in poverty, which is the real impediment to receipt of medical care of adequate quality," he said.

The authors of the study are correct that self-reported health status is not accurate for Latino immigrants, Vega said. "In fact, it is contradicted by self-reported lower ratings of health problems and chronic medical conditions in major health surveys going back 20 years," he noted.

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