Perched on the corner of Federal Boulevard and West 38th Avenue, you’ll find a quaint shop with the sign “Botanica Yemaya.” Complete with folk healers and herbal remedies, botanicas dot the landscape of majority-Hispanic areas. This is hardly surprising: Large percentages of major groups in the United States have a strong faith in unconventional treatments.
Researchers studying conventional and alternative medicine usage among different ethnic groups found that Hispanics were the most likely to turn to home remedies. Latino immigrants were the fastest growing subpopulation to dabble in the unconventional, with rates of usage hovering anywhere from 50 percent to 90 percent.
But why should we care about the quirky medical habits of certain groups?
Obamacare’s passage gives us all the more reason to be concerned. The success of this mammoth bill hinges on young, healthy folks buying comprehensive health insurance. According to the Obama administration, including healthy twenty-somethings in the health care market means that insurance companies will not target the old and sick when determining premiums. What happens, though, if a large segment of your target population isn’t sold on the merits of conventional primary care?
This should concern Obamacare’s many overseers, given that Hispanics are by far the fastest growing group in the United States. More than half of this group is below the age of 30, making them prime targets for the new health care law. Colorado is on the brink of a major demographic shift, with a 44 percent increase in the underage Hispanic population in the past 10 years. A mass defection from the individual insurance requirement could be a death blow to the new reforms.
Yet, the new system of comprehensive care flies in the face of centuries of Latino tradition. Alternative treatment serves as part of a broader system where the major decider is the female head of the family. If a young one develops a nasty cough, the matriarch’s first instinct is to work outside of the system. Conventional care is typically sought out only in more extreme cases. These practices have their roots in a fundamentally different understanding of disease. Tradition sorts ailments into “cold” diseases and “hot” diseases. Any issue that pops up is understood as an imbalance of temperature in the body. Asthma is typically thought of as a “cold” disease, a problem that should be balanced out by a “hot” remedy such as syrup.
If a young, healthy person thinks in this way, his cost-benefit analysis will be skewed in deciding to follow the individual mandate. Why should a 26-year-old Hispanic male in tip-top shape buy an extensive plan if he doesn’t buy into the idea of primary care? The price to pay for not purchasing health insurance runs past $1,000, but the average premium cost is far higher.
But this is assuming that target populations even know about Obamacare in the first place. A recent Colorado study demonstrates that only 6 percent of Latinos realize that they can benefit from government insurance exchanges. The Department of Health and Human Services has marshaled a major outreach effort to keep minorities in the know, but there is only so much they can do.
The federal agency is overwhelmed with implementation issues of the act, and has already had to delay key provisions of the health care law.
Ross Marchand of Colorado Springs attends the University of Maryland, and is an avid blogger and researcher.
