I attended the Institute for Population Research Seminar on Public Health ft. Eric Sieber on January 8, 2019. This event was located in Townsend Hall, Room 38, and took place from 12:30-1:30 pm.
Mr. Sieber’s presentation was about Medicaid and the disparities between native and immigrant child having health insurance. He noted that if immigrant parents had health insurance coverage, then they were likely to have coverage for their children as well. In some states, Medicaid is readily available and accessible to both native and immigrant families, along with their children. There is not much a difference between native and immigrant children when it comes to percentages of children that are uninsured; the same percentage of children are uninsured, whether they are native or immigrants. In other states that do not have Medicaid readily available, the disparities are great. More immigrant children are not insured compared to native children; around 36% of immigrant children were uninsured in Utah, and only 15% of native children were uninsured in this state.
Mr. Sieber’s talk was interesting because it shed light on the disadvantages that immigrants have in the United States. Access to Medicaid is only one of those disadvantages. I found this topic especially intriguing because I hope to enter into the medical field as my future profession, and it was eye-opening to see how many immigrant children do not have health insurance. I specifically wish to work with children in the future, and it’s awful that some are not protected by some sort of medical insurance. It is extremely important to have medical insurance, and I hope that maybe one day I can help these immigrant children who do not have the same accessibility to these services.
While this talk was interesting and opened me up to topics and data that I have not yet been exposed to, I was also confused by Mr. Sieber’s jargon at times. There were a fair amount of topics that he was discussing that I was not knowledgable on, and this made me want to look into this issue further in order to fully understand what’s happening in our country. I hope to expose myself more to our countries challenges concerning medical care, and to become more globally aware of medical issues as well.