CHICAGO (AP) — Celeste Castillo, a Guatemalan immigrant, was invited to a news conference with Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius early last year to help promote enrollment in the country's new health insurance marketplaces. From the podium, the U.S. citizen excitedly spoke of soon being able to get insurance for the first time under President Barack Obama's health care law. [...] it's also ironic that she ran into such difficulties because Latinos were among the groups the Obama administration most coveted for enrollment and fell short in signing up, according to federal figures released last week. Castillo, who moved to the United States 38 years ago and speaks English well, was no ordinary consumer; she's a board member at a community health clinic where she has received care on a sliding fee scale because she couldn't afford private insurance and didn't qualify for Medicaid before the health law's expansion. With an estimated annual income of $19,183 for a two-person household — herself and her 22-year-old daughter, a full-time student — Castillo qualified for expanded Medicaid. In a reassessment of her case, under rules for the Medicaid expansion established in the Affordable Care Act, the money was determined to be a gift from her husband to help pay for his daughter's college education. The new Medicaid rules allow Illinois officials to consider the husband's contribution a gift because Castillo, while married, files income taxes separately from her husband.
Reported by SeattlePI.com 10 hours ago.
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