Immigrants who are eligible for Obamacare are running into problems when they try to sign up for health coverage on HealthCare.gov because of safeguards that were put in place to weed out illegal immigrants,
The Wall Street Journal reported.
People born outside of the United States who are trying to sign up on HealthCare.gov are having difficulty proving they are their identities and submitting documents that demonstrate they are in the country legally.
As a result, some are being redirected to Medicaid even though they don't qualify, while others struggle to navigate an online system with a range of glitches, including a failure to verify people without an extensive credit history. Verification is an essential step in creating an account.
"A lot of advocates are frustrated," Angel Padilla, health policy analyst at the National Immigration Law Center, told the Journal.
Hispanics have the highest rate of uninsured of all racial or ethnic groups, with roughly 25 percent without coverage.
The glitches in the enrollment process are undermining the Obama administration's target to enroll more Hispanics, particularly because there has been a push to increase enrollment after a poor showing during the first year of the program.
"While the vast majority of users are having a good experience, we continue to work to make instructions understandable and our processes more streamlined," Aaron Albright, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), told the Journal.
CMS officials also said that the administration had improved identity verification by making sure that a support line was available in 200 languages.
They said they were not aware of some of the problems alleged by the immigrants' rights groups, but said they welcomed more information so that they could take it up for review, the Journal reported.
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