Covered California may have had strong overall enrollment, but people who do not speak English as a first language are underrepresented in the state's health insurance marketplace, according to an analysis from Berkeley's Greenlining Institute.
The report relied on Covered California data, which showed that 20 percent of enrollees do not speak English as a primary language. That's compared with 44 percent of Californians overall.
"We know California is a diverse state ethnically and linguistically," said Jordan Medina, a health policy fellow with Greenlining and lead author of the study. "Moving forward, if the Affordable Care Act is going to work in California, we have to make sure those populations are represented in the health insurance marketplace."
As part of its analysis, Greenlining interviewed certified enrollment counselors working to help people sign up for insurance through Covered California. While online sign-up was available in English and Spanish, people who spoke other languages had only printed material available. Counselors reported that they ran out of materials in at least some languages.
Counselors said they preferred helping people sign up by using the online portal, but since it was available only in English and Spanish, it slowed them down. A counselor with an agency that worked with Japanese-Americans told Greenlining, "We tried to use the website, because that's what Covered California suggested we do, but the line-by-line translation with elderly Japanese-Americans made the process extremely tedious."