Uninsured in Chicago

"Latinos are the largest racial group without health insurance in the nation, and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was supposed to help fix this. Six years after implementation, however, millions of Latinos who were eligible for health insurance remained uninsured. In this book, Robert Vargas shadowed the lives of 40 uninsured young adults in Chicago during the first three years of the ACA (2013-2016) to understand the roots of this problem. By accompanying uninsured Latinos as they lived their lives and interacted with the health care system both online and in-person, Vargas illuminates multiple structures that inhibited access to health insurance. This included the criminalized informal health care economy, which severely punished uninsured Latinos for engaging in petty thefts to acquire life-saving medications. Traumatic past experiences with health care bureaucracies also dissuaded Latinos from using the ACA, as memories of long waits or stigmatization from rude staff soured their perceptions of the ACA. Amidst these constraining structures, Vargas also discovered glimmers of hope through the positive role health navigators, social networks, and family members played in overcoming structural barriers and facilitating access to health insurance. This groundbreaking ethnography is one of the most intimate accounts of the lives of uninsured Latinos, and provides readers with a wealth of ideas to imagine new ways to empower Latino communities into dismantling or transforming the nation's social safety net for the better"--