The Uninformed Find the Door to Healthcare Shut
The removal of socioeconomic barriers to immigrants' access to health care is a fundamental policy tool. Still, there are additional barriers in health inequalities to reckon with. In their paper Inequities in Immigrants' Access to Health Care Services: Disentangling Potential Barriers, Carlo Devillanova and Tommaso Frattini make use of a large Italian National Health survey to estimate the correlation between immigrant status and the probability of accessing general practitioners, specialist doctors, hospitals, and emergency departments.
"First, we have identified immigrants relying on both their citizenship and their country of birth. This enabled us to identify the behavior of second-generation immigrants", Carlo Devillanova says. The authors found out that, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables, immigrants are 45% less likely to visit specialist doctors and 45% more likely to contact emergency services than natives. Second-generation immigrants are less likely to visit specialist doctors, too, but they have higher hospitalization rates than natives (+60%). In both cases, migrants seem to face barriers to access specialist doctors. It eventually leads them to experience acute diseases.
The question is: why does it happen? "Our hypothesis, supported by data, is that immigrants face non-economic barriers to access such as lack of information, bureaucratic difficulties, and language barrier". Here is an example: almost 37% of immigrant women who had given birth in the six years prior the survey did not undergo a prenatal diagnosis during pregnancy simply because they were not aware of it, compared to 12% of Italian women in the same situation. "The Italian Constitution states that the Republic safeguards health as a fundamental right of the individual and as a collective interest", Devillanova remarks. "Prompt and equitable access to health care is an ethically and economically desirable objective".
Read more about this topic:
The Mark of the Great Migrations. Article by Andrea Colli
Massimo Anelli. The Political Costs of Emigration
Alessandra Casarico. Market Benefits for Legalized Immigrants
Joseph-Simon Goerlach. Moving from the South to the North Improves Your Salary. But Not Your Wealth
Paolo Pinotti. Foreign Students at School: How to Break Educational Segregation
Graziella Romeo. The Contradictions of the European Legal System