Hispanics and effective health care communication in the United States of America: a corpus-based analysis

Abstract

Health care reform and immigration reform are heated subjects in the United States of America. The main research question of this paper links the two by analyzing the effectiveness of government communication about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) towards Hispanics. The expansion of health insurance does not necessarily ensure access to care for all members of this minority group. Apart from questions of eligibility, immigrants face other obstacles, such as language, cultural differences, and perceptions about health care. These realities should be taken into consideration when communicating with Latinos, but was this the case for ACA? This paper presents the results of a corpus-based research of six government sources and six sources from non-profit organizations on ACA. An analysis of effective communication using 11 parameters was performed on this corpus and showed that undeniable communicative flaws, together with the too frequent lack of linguistic accuracy in Spanish, point out the need for experts when it comes to communicate publically with ethnic minorities.