Immigration rights’ activists largely cheered President Obama’s recent executive order that would permit certain people already in the U.S. to stay in the country, but in California, it may also be a boon for expanded MediCal enrollments.
Assuming it holds, the order announced last week would affect some 5 million people of immigrant status. Currently, the Affordable Care Act does not apply to non-citizens, but in California, many would likely be eligible, or would have family members eligible, for the MediCal expansion, which as helped a significant share of Latinos in particular obtain coverage.
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Gabrielle Lessard is a health policy attorney with the Los Angeles office of the National Immigration Law Center. “They’ll be in the same situation as DACA,” she said, in reference to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Obama’s 2012 policy for young undocumented immigrants who had come to the United States as children.
While most states do not extend Medicaid benefits to DACA immigrants, California does.
“‘Deferred action’ means those individuals who are approved are considered lawfully present,” said Ronald Coleman, government affairs manager for the California Immigrant Policy Center. “California has historically covered broad populations of immigrants who reside in the state.”
Particularly with families of mixed immigration status, enrollment in MediCal is expected to increase, according to California Healthline:
Many Californians who are eligible for Medi-Cal — in particular, children born in the state who are legal citizens — have not signed up for Medi-Cal because they live in mixed-immigration-status families.
With the fear of deportation lifted among many of those families, the ones who are Medi-Cal-eligible are expected to enroll in greater numbers, health advocates said.
Covered California has already been one of the most successful state-run exchanges under Obamacare, and seeing more enrollment from Latinos, who make nearly 40 percent of the state’s population, will further add to its enrollment figures.
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Yet it remains unclear exactly how many will be eligible — of the 5 million immigrants impacted nationally, about 1 percent live in California, And some of that number may not qualify for expanded MediCal because they either make too much money or have employer-sponsored coverage, KQED reported.
