Spending cuts, immigration, and Medicaid are at the top of the Washington agenda. That climate provides fertile ground for misinformation and myths to multiply on social networks. Some of the most common are those surrounding immigrants, Latinos, and Medicaid.
These claims include assertions that Latinos who use Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income people and those with disabilities, “do not work” and exaggerations of the percentage of people with Medicaid who are Latinos.
The U.S. House voted narrowly on Feb. 25 in favor of a budget blueprint that could lead to Medicaid cuts of up to $880 billion over a decade.
Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are part of the national safety net, covering about 80 million people. Medicaid enrollment grew under the Affordable Care Act and after the start of the covid-19 pandemic but then started falling during the final two years of the Biden administration.
Immigrants’ impact on the nation’s health care system can be overstated in heated political rhetoric. Now-Vice President JD Vance said on the campaign trail last year that “we’re bankrupting a lot of hospitals by forcing these hospitals to provide care for people who don’t have the legal right to be in our country.” PolitiFact rated that statement “False.”
KFF Health News, in partnership with Factchequeado, compiled five myths circulating on social media and analyzed them with experts in the field.
1. Do Latinos who receive Medicaid work?
Most do. A KFF analysis of Medicaid data found that almost 67% of Latinos on Medicaid work, “which is a higher share of Medicaid adults who are working compared to other racial and ethnic groups,” said Jennifer Tolbert, deputy director of KFF’s Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
“For many low-income people, the myth is that they are not working, even though we know from a lot of data that many people work but don’t have access to affordable employer-sponsored insurance,” said Timothy McBride, co-director at the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy and Economics Research, part of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis.
Neither the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health nor the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services responded to requests for comment.
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2. Are Latinos the largest group enrolled in Medicaid?
No. White people who are not Hispanic represent the biggest demographic group in Medicaid and CHIP. The programs’ enrollment is 42% non-Hispanic white, 28% Latinos, and 18% non-Hispanic Black, with small percentages of other minorities, according to a CMS document.
Latinos’ share of total Medicaid enrollment “has remained fairly stable for many years — hovering between 26 and 30% since at least 2008,” said Gideon Lukens, research and data analysis director on the health policy team at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research organization.
In a Feb. 18 blog post, Alex Nowrasteh and Jerome Famularo of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote: “The biggest myth in the debate over immigrant welfare use is that noncitizens — which includes illegal immigrants and those lawfully present on various temporary visas and green cards — disproportionately consume welfare. That is not the case.” They included Medicaid in the term “welfa