Texas deals with barriers to signing immigrants up for health coverage

Outreach is also proving a big barrier to signing Latinos up for health insurance in California, many say.

Texas Tribune: Glitches Threaten ACA Coverage For Some Immigrants
Health advocates helping the state's minority population say they've been working to overcome language barriers, technical issues and low awareness of who is eligible to obtain coverage under the federal health law. With the first enrollment period closed, enrollees are now dealing with inconsistencies in their applications, which are detected when the marketplace website finds a data matching issue between the reported citizenship information and the information the government has on file for an individual (Ura, 8/21).

The California Health Report: Hurdles Remain to Signing Up More Latinos For Health Coverage
As a college-prep consultant, Marina Grijalva heard about the Affordable Care Act and how it would enable her to sign up for health insurance. But the enrollment campaigns -- which the state poured tens of millions of dollars into -- didn't reach her sister or many other Latinos. Had Grijalva not informed her sister of the new health law and walked her through the enrollment process, the 53-year-old woman may have remained uninsured this year. She would not have been alone (Kritz, 8/20).

Elsewhere, salary and benefits are cutting into hospital profits --

Modern Healthcare: Hospitals See More Paying Patients, But There's a Hitch
Insurance expansion under health care reform is starting to yield patient volume for hospitals, but the costs of staffing up for more patients are eclipsing the additional revenue. Earnings reports for not-for-profit systems in the first half of the year show that many providers are seeing rising salary and benefit expenses cut into revenue gains, leading to smaller operating surpluses (Kutscher, 8/20).