Public Charge Rule: Immigration Policy Affected Latinx Children’s Medicaid Enrollment

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

11:00 AM-12:00 PM

Cynthia Pando is a PhD candidate in Health Services Research, Policy, and Administration at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the structural barriers that impede marginalized populations’ access to healthcare services, integrating theories and methods from health policy, population health, and sociology. Previously, she was a research assistant at the State Health Access Data Assistance Center, where she worked on multiple state-focused projects, including Minnesota’s Community and Uninsured Profile. She was a pre-doctoral Population Health T-32 NICHD trainee at the Minnesota Population Center.

In January 2017, soon after the Trump administration took office, a draft executive order outlining changes to an existing federal immigration policy, the public charge rule, was leaked. This led to concern over its implications on immigrant families, which only increased as community organizations started reporting that immigrant families were disenrolling from social services. Amid conversations on what the proposed changes to the public charge rule could mean to the 45 million immigrants living in the United States, immigration advocates argued that the proposed changes could have unintended health effects on Latinx US-born citizen children with immigrant family members. In response to these concerns, this study evaluates the effect of the 2017 proposed public charge rule on Medicaid enrollment of Latinx US-born citizen children by parental immigration status at the national level.

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Contact Information

Sandra Hartasanchez
sah477@drexel.edu