Americans aren’t staying on top of their wellness check ups and reports are saying it shows. Aflac’s 2024 Wellness Matters found that more people are waiting for a medical emergency to access care, with about 52% of Americans using convenience care as their primary option. For Latino Americans specifically, this survey provided critical insights on the barriers preventing Latinos from accessing preventative healthcare and a growing trend of relying on urgent care or emergency services to meet their primary healthcare needs. According to the survey, 58% of Latinos primarily use urgent care and emergency rooms as their primary healthcare option.

“I haven’t been to a primary care doctor in maybe two or three years,” Minnesota resident Ashley Gil de Lamadrid told PBS News, in a roundup report of Americans who forgo going to the doctor.

Overall, logistics was listed as the number one thing preventing people from scheduling checkups and screenings on time, including conflicts with work hours or not being able to take time off work, difficulty in getting childcare, and barriers with transportation. According to the report, 33% of women reported avoiding scheduling mammograms and 34% avoided pap smears, both up from last year.

For Latinos, the health risks are higher and these barriers towards accessing care are compounding. According to the Wellness report, 56% of Latinos reported a family history of chronic illness or disease, yet 64% said they skipped important health or cancer screenings, which can lead to devastating consequences.

In 2019, Side Effects Public Media spoke to Magdalena Hernandez, a Spanish-speaking Indiana resident who was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2017. She experienced symptoms like fatigue, weakness in her legs, and pain she described as “more painful than labor,” but did not seek medical attention for years in part, she said, because of her distrust of the medical system. When she finally sought help, a doctor told her she had inflammation and cleared her to go back to work. She did not seek medical care for another year.

“I told the doctor what had happened the previous year and that’s when he told me I had cancer, and that it was advanced and that I didn’t have the care that I should have had,” she told Side Effects.

When put into context, this finding may not be so shocking. A KFF report released in March found that about half of U.S. adults struggle to afford healthcare costs, with 1 in 4 saying they skipped or postponed care in the last year because they couldn’t afford it. With high costs for healthcare, insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) can still cost hundreds per month, and an estimated 26 million Americans are uninsured. Given the rising costs of living essentials – rent, food, and childcare– healthcare, especially when it’s not an emergency, falls low in the ranking of importance.

“For many people cost and access pose significant hurdles to receiving preventive care. In early 2023 the national uninsured rate reached an all-time low of 7.7%, and while that’s good news, it still means that more than 25 million people across the nation aren’t benefiting from the ACA provision to cover essential preventive services,” Paul Reed, MD, director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP), wrote ODPHP’s Jan. 2024 blog.

Cost of healthcare is top of mind for voters in the 2024 election. In May, Pew Research Center found affordability ranks third for both Republicans and Democrats, behind inflation and the ability for both parties to work together. Given the significant voting power of the 16.5 million who voted in the 2020 election, a number which is likely to increase as an estimated 1 million Latinos turn 18 and become eligible to vote each year, according to Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization Unidos US, increasing accessibility and affordability is an important issue, especially for the millions of Latinos who are uninsured.

According to the latest U.S. Census data, Latinos face the highest uninsured rate in the U.S., almost 18%, with nearly 50% of uninsured Latinos being undocumented. Documentation status and eligibility restrictions for Medicaid, including a five year waiting period after gaining citizenship to be able to enroll, prevents immigrants without documentation from obtaining coverage and often, accessing care at all.

With 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to be living in the U.S., and high concentrations of this population living in states like Texas that restrict access to abortion and other reproductive health services, people with both wanted and unwanted pregnancies carry additional burdens in accessing the care they need.

“When we limit access to health care, affordable health care coverage, we also limit access to reproductive health care and so that includes things like no cost contraception, maternity health services, and even basic preventative services like cancer screenings,” Lucie Arvallo, senior policy analyst at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice told Reckon last year.

Adding a cultural approach to healthcare

With 40% of respondents saying that language is a major barrier in both understanding their medical needs and understanding insurance policies, culture may be key in removing barriers for Latinos to access the care they need, especially when it comes to things like mental health, which still carry stigma in the community. A 2022 report by IL Latino News spoke to several mental health experts who said that incorporating group gatherings, informal settings, and food appealed to Latinos when engaging in mental health because it linked back to cultural pillars.

“Let’s bring in coffee; let’s do a coffee cake. We love to eat, we love to drink, we love to talk, so bringing things in that culturally make us comfortable and that we’re familiar with will help to ease some of the anxiety that comes with thinking, ‘I’m working on my mental health,’ which is stigmatized or tabooed in our culture and other cultures as well,” mental health counselor and owner of Advocacy & Education Consulting Pamela Fullerton said.

According to the study, 62% of Black respondents and 58% of Latinos said health care providers and organizations need to better engage and educate their cultural communities about the benefits of preventative care.

As more studies show Latinos refraining from accessing routine care, medical experts say intervention is needed to prevent further negative outcomes in all areas of health.

“Forgoing needed medical care when needed or not having access to preventive medicine can have disastrous consequences in health, even in the short term,” Dr. César Caraballo Cordovez, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale School of Medicine Center for Outcomes Research & Evaluation told the American Heart Association in 2023.