A Tool to Estimate the Impact of Expanding Health Insurance Options for Noncitizen Immigrants

Several states are pursuing efforts to expand health insurance options for immigrants. However, information about this population — particularly undocumented immigrants — are lacking. Specifically, detailed data on the size and demographics of the undocumented and recent legally present immigrant populations in each state — as well as their health insurance status, health insurance take-up rates, and health care spending — are largely unavailable.

To address the limited information available to policymakers and other stakeholders regarding the costs and outcomes associated with expanding health insurance to immigrant populations, the authors developed a web-based tool that has two key components: (1) maps of the United States that include state-level information on existing state policies and population sizes and (2) an interactive tool to estimate the costs and insurance enrollment outcomes associated with user-specified policy options to provide health coverage to ineligible immigrants. The authors drew from several data sources to build the underlying analytic dataset for the tool. The primary limitation of the tool is that, although it provides a ballpark estimate of the enrollment and costs associated with implementing state-funded health insurance programs for immigrants, the results are not precise.